The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.96 (625 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0307914968 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 482 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-08-09 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"If you work in computers/software/information sciences, this should be a must-read" according to Kim Crosser. As someone who has been in computers and information sciences since 1970, this was an amazing and entertaining book.I knew a lot of the history, having lived some of it, but a lot of this was new to me.Very well-researched and presented in a clear and highly readable style. This volume clearly covers the concepts and development of theories of information. It covers both theory and practice and whether you are a beginning computer programmer or an information science theorist, you should find something in here that you didn't know and that will awaken you to some new ideas.If you like this volume, try "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstad. only one thing wrong This book was hard to get through but only because there was so many incredibly important ideas. I read this months ago and I am still thinking about it. The part I disliked? That there was almost no actual communications research presented. All (or all but a tiny bit) came from engineering or computer science. University communications departments have ceded the entirety of modern communications theory and practice to others. And the worst part is that they don't even care or seem aware of that fact. So my review of the book? Read it. It is fascinating and one of the most important books to read if you want to get a good, basic overview of . "is information without meaning ,meaningful?" according to Victor V. C. Patton. As a history the book is superb. It documents the flood of data in a quantifiable manner. As a theory it vacillates between information without meaning and information with meaning. This problem was created when Shannon's paper on communication theory was referred to as information theory. This confusion is avoided if it is clearly understood that Shannon's work applies only to the symbol patterns in a communication channel. The encoding table, created by human intellect, creates the pattern carried by the symbols. Shanon enters at this point and puts a scientific and engineering foundation under the design of the communication channel which
If Borges's "Library of Babel" is literature's iconic cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which "creatures of the information" may just recognize themselves. Along the way, readers learn about music and quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an "interesting number," and why "the bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle." What results is a visceral sense of information's contemporary precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physical/symbolic palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate analy
From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself. And then the information age arrives. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.From the Hardcover e