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Bitwise : a life in code
Auerbach D., Pantheon Books, New York, NY, 2018. 304 pp. Type: Book (978-0-670024-93-3)
Date Reviewed: May 2 2019

This is perhaps the most peculiar book I have ever reviewed. It is essentially a collection of philosophical and autobiographical essays on the subject of computing, specifically on topics the author finds interesting. Whether you, the reader, will find the book interesting or not is a matter of how closely your interests align with the author’s.

So, to begin with, let’s talk about the author. Auerbach is a writer/philosopher who segued his life into the computing field. He studied computer science as theory, but his professional life has been as a practitioner, working for companies like Microsoft and Google. He was introduced to computing in the 1980s, so what he writes about is allied closely with what he knows from that era. From my point of view as a software engineer, his writing is at its most interesting when he describes some of his experiences working for the aforementioned computing companies. For example, his stories of working for Microsoft and trying to align its Messenger function with the similar functionality provided by AOL (who didn’t want that linkage to exist!) are fascinating.

Overall, Auerbach writes about the computing field, but through a philosopher’s lens. Chapters include “Naming of Parts,” “Self-Approximations,” “Games Computers Play,” “Big Data,” and “Programming My Child” (you have to read this one if you’re a parent; it presents a whole new look at parenting!). If any of those topics sound interesting to you, then you won’t find a more relevant book in the computing literature. I found them mildly interesting, but not enough to read every word carefully.

Perhaps the book’s most important reason for being is stated in its epilogue: “We need our unqualified nuances and irregularities to elude code and ontology.” In saying that, Auerbach pretty well summarizes those earlier chapters mentioned here, in which the main thrust is that we computing folk (and perhaps everyone else) are unique and categorization isn’t entirely healthy for us, even though computers need to--and try to--do it.

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Reviewer:  R. L. Glass Review #: CR146556 (1907-0259)
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