Reading is always a pleasure. And even more so when the summer holidays begin and we can take to the beach or wherever we go to rest for a few weeks, all those half-finished books and those others that have been given to us and we haven’t started yet.
But it is also the time to discover new titles, technological books that can be recommended… for example from this article that we publish today in MCPRO and in which we collect some of the most interesting novelties of this year, from “How to do nothing” from Jenny Odell to Tripp Mike’s analysis of that new company that Apple has become or what the Infocracy is, a probable “substitute” for our democracies in which trolls and algorithms play their cards. Let’s start!
Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy – Byung-Chul Han
We are at a time when thousands of bots spread fake news, social networks are filled with hate speech that influences the formation of public opinion, and armies of trolls intervene in political campaigns, influencing opinion formation. public and generating misinformation.
Conspiracy theories and propaganda dominate the political debate. Through psychometrics and digital psychopolitics, trying to influence voting behavior and avoid conscious decisions. Byung-Chul Han’s new essay describes the crisis of democracy and attributes it to the structural change of the public sphere in the digital world. He also gives this phenomenon a name: infocracy.
Build: An Unorthodox guide to making things worth making – Tony Fadell
Tony Fadell was part of the General Magic team that dreamed up and built the precursor to the smartphone in the 1990s. He later led the Apple teams that created the iPod and iPhone and other products that changed technology history.
Build is a container for many of the lessons Fadell learned about leadership, design, startups, decision-making, mentoring, failure, and success during his over 30 years of experience in Silicon Valley. In this book he explains to us that it is not necessary to reinvent everything from scratch to do something great. Some basic principles of collaboration and management can lay the foundation for the greatest technological advances.
The Pragmatic Programmer – David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
The Pragmatic Programmer is one of those rare technical books that gets read, reread, and reread for years. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt wrote the first edition of this highly influential book in 1999 to help their customers build better software and rediscover the joy of writing code.
Now, more than twenty years later, this new edition reexamines what it means to be a modern programmer. Topics range from personal responsibility and professional development to architecture techniques to keep the code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse.
Written as a series of self-contained sections and packed with old and new anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, this book illustrates the best approaches and biggest pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. It doesn’t matter if you’re a novice, an experienced programmer, or a responsible software project manager, this book will develop the habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in any career.
After Steve: How Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost its soul – Tripp Mickle
Author Tripp Mickle, a veteran Apple reporter who has published numerous articles and reports on the company, has taken a close look at the drastic changes that have occurred in Apple. America’s Favorite Tech Company since the death of its co-founder and spiritual leader Steve Jobs in 2011.
“After Steve” tells the untold story of the rise of the company’s COO-turned-CEO Tim Cook and the dwindling influence of chief designer Jony Ive, whom Jobs considered his spiritual son.
Mickle interviews hundreds of people in and around the company to describe the major events of the Cook era, as well as address big questions about how Apple could develop world-changing new products as its profits shifted away from the iPhone.
Cybersecurity for managers – Víctor Eduardo Deutsch
Cyber attacks on organizations of all kinds have increased exponentially. Every day we read news of companies and public entities that have suffered significant, even devastating, losses due to the action of cybercriminals. Are we entering too dangerous a business? Are digital risks predictable? Do we have to live in fear of a cybersecurity incident? How should we act in the face of such an attack?
Most managers are very well trained and trained to manage the traditional risks of companies, but they have doubts when facing these new digital challenges because they do not have training in this area or it is still incipient and attacks are more and more silent, intelligent and sophisticated.
Cybersecurity for managers allows those responsible for companies and teams that do not come from the field of security or information technology to manage the three fundamental pillars of cybersecurity: identify the risks that have arisen, establish controls and put into practice the processes and organization necessary to do so efficiently. With simple language and a practical approach, the book also includes real cases and numerous studies to facilitate the explanation of complex issues and examples from history, establishing analogies with the challenges posed by the digital age.
How to Do Nothing – Jenny Odell
In a world where our value is determined by productivity and performance, the action of doing nothing can be our greatest form of protest. This is what Jenny Odell argues in this work, who radically questions the capitalization of our time, the profitability of our attention and the state of impatience and anxiety in which we live.
Marked by the invasive logic of social networks and the cult of personal branding, we have forgotten what inactivity means. From this perspective, “doing nothing” is buying time for ourselves, being contemplative and exercising perception, recovering the link with physical reality and finding ways of relating to each other from which neither companies nor algorithms benefit.
Far from anti-technology, “How to Do Nothing” is a manifesto against the discourse of efficiency and technodeterminism, an original essay in which recovering our space away from a dizzying pace constitutes an act of resistance.
