The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution. Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology’s loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn’t. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years—and the next twenty.

 Protesters called it an act of war when the U.S. Coast Guard sank a Canadian-flagged vessel in the Gulf of Mexico in 1929. It took a cool-headed codebreaker solving a “trunk-full” of smugglers’ encrypted messages to get Uncle Sam out of the mess: Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s groundbreaking work helped prove the boat was owned by American gangsters. This book traces the career of a legendary U.S. law enforcement agent, from her work for the Allies during World War I through Prohibition, when she faced danger from mobsters while testifying in high profile trials. Friedman founded the cryptanalysis unit that provided evidence against American rum runners and Chinese drug smugglers. During World War II, her decryptions brought a Japanese spy to justice and her Coast Guard unit solved the Enigma ciphers of German spies. Friedman’s “all source intelligence” model is still used by law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies against 21st century threats.

An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer lan­guages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach’s imagination. With a philoso­pher’s sense of inquiry, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the pro­gramming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his education as an engineer, and his contribu­tions to instant messaging technology devel­oped for Microsoft and the servers powering Google’s data stores. A lifelong student of the systems that shape our lives—from the psy­chiatric taxonomy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to how Facebook tracks and profiles its users—Auerbach reflects on how he has experienced the algorithms that taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior and that compel us to do the same. Into this exquisitely crafted, wide-ranging memoir of a life spent with code, Auerbach has woven an eye-opening and searing examina­tion of the inescapable ways in which algo­rithms have both standardized and coarsened our lives. As we engineer ever more intricate technology to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the ma­chine, Auerbach argues, we willingly erase our nuances and our idiosyncrasies—precisely the things that make us human.

In Life Code: The New Rules for Winning in the Real World, six-time New York Times #1 best-selling author Dr. Phil McGraw abandons traditional thinking and tells you the ugly truth about the users, abusers, and overall “bad guys” we all have in our lives. He also reveals the secrets of how they think and how they get to and exploit you and those you love. You’ll gain incredible insight into these negative people, which he refers to as BAITERs (Backstabbers, Abusers, Imposters, Takers, Exploiters, Reckless), and you’ll gain the tools to protect yourself from their assaults. Dr. Phil's new book gives you the “Evil Eight” identifiers so you can see them coming from a mile away, as well as their “Secret Playbook,” which contains the “Nefarious 15” tactics they use to exploit you and take what is yours mentally, physically, socially and professionally. Life Code then focuses on you and your playbook, which contains the “Sweet 16” tactics for winning in the real world. Edgy, controversial and sometimes irreverent, Dr. Phil again abandons convention to prepare you to claim what you deserve and claim it now. You take flying lessons to learn to fly, swimming lessons to learn to swim, and singing lessons to learn to sing. So, why not take winning lessons to learn to win?

Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

Originally published in 1997 by City Lights Books.

The authors examine software from a spatial perspective, analyzing the dyadic relationship of software & space. The production of space, they argue, is increasingly dependent on code, & code is written to produce space.