The Power-Up is the best way stay up to date on the gaming industry news. Click here to find out why!

We hope you love the books people recommend! Just so you know, The CEO Library may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page.

This book has 1 recommendation

Steve Jobs (Founder/Apple)

Now, I had heard from my publisher (who knew Jobs from way back) that Jobs had liked my recently published book The Tao of Programming. So I thought, why not? and walked up and introduced myself. Jobs smiled, shook my outstretched hand and said:

Amazon description

The Tao of Programming is a book written in 1987 by Geoffrey James. Written in a tongue-in-cheek style spoof of classic Taoist texts such as the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi which belies its serious message, it consists of a series of short anecdotes divided into nine "books":

  • The Silent Void
  • The Ancient Masters
  • Design
  • Coding
  • Maintenance
  • Management
  • Corporate Wisdom
  • Hardware and Software
  • Epilogue

The themes of the book espouse many hacker ideals—managers should leave programmers to their work; code should be small, elegant, and maintainable; corporate wisdom is more often than not an oxymoron; and so on.

Geoffrey James wrote two other books on this theme, The Zen of Programming in 1988 and Computer Parables: Enlightenment in the Information Age in 1989.

Get this book on Amazon | Barnes & Noble

See more books recommended by

Steve Jobs

See more books written by

Geoffrey James

Sources

We'd love to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment:

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.