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Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists
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Author: Cathy A. Lazere, Dennis Elliott Shasha
List Price: $16.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0387982698
Publisher: Copernicus Books (June, 1998)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 96,909
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Inside Their Minds
Entering into dialogue with the leading scientists of our time is one of the best ways to understand and appreciate science. Yet the educated public is rarely presented with such opportunities. Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere's ^Out of Their Minds^ vicariously invites the reader into such a conversation with the leading scientists of the leading science of our time: Computer Science. The result is an engaging and informative book about the high-tech cognoscenti. Tutorial break-out boxes on related technical points make this an unusually useful book.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Great subject, pitiful writing
This book is about some great people: McCarthy, Djikstra, Knuth, Brooks... The biography of any one of them could be a 500+ pages story that would read like a novel. If you recognized the names above, you're expecting a compendium of epic proportions. If you didn't, well... you should; these are the Newtons, the Einsteins of the computer age.The basic problem is that the authors are completely unable to convey any of this excitement. Reading the book, you feel as if they spent an afternoon talking to some boring old academic. Maybe they were bored; they definitely managed to convey THAT feeling. If you want an account of the history of computer science, you could try "The Dream Machine", which is about so much more than Licklider. At least it's readable.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Not only weak but not representative
To somebody outside of computer science this book may look outstanding. But anyone in the field will quickly recognize that scientists like Turin and von Neumann were left out while quite a few mediocre but popular ones were included. It seems that the authors were searching for the most popular and currently alive. Even if this was their criteria, they missed their target, since the choice could have been a lot better. The science itself is written in a pleasant way but lacks brilliance and deeper understanding. The human side of the scientists is also practically absent. The only goal that this book may claim to have reached is to impress and confuse naive readers. Hardly rewarding.
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