Before hacking was a thing, The Cuckoo’s Egg provides the best firsthand account of tracking down an intruder by the author masterfully combining gripping storytelling with intricate technical details, offering readers a captivating and informative narrative of Stoll’s relentless pursuit to uncover a hacker’s trail. — Blair Campbell

It’s hard to believe there was a time not long ago when every city was supposed to become a “smart” city in order to thrive. Mattern questions this idea and provides insights as to why these attempts have (fortunately) failed (so far). — Mauricio Giraldo

From arguably the grandfather of human-centered interaction and user experience as we see it today. It opens our eyes to understanding the world around us and shows the user’s importance in creating future technologies. It is a timeless treatise on the increasing powers of observation. Heck, it is the foundation of websites like The Verge that deal with the consumer side of technology. — Ravi Kanth

It understands technology not as things but as practice — as how we do things — and so provides a frame for the social and political context of technology. Franklin’s concepts of holistic and prescriptive technologies are extremely relevant to current discussions around AI and other tech. — Mandy Brown

Encountering the concept of “focal practices” and acknowledging the “device paradigm” were mind-opening and literally life-altering for me. Borgmann’s thought is essential to helping us discern what the Good Life looks like in a technological society. — Matt Civico

The rise of id Software and the two Johns (Carmack and Romero) is iconic and looks at the founding of much of the gamer culture of today. The innovations brought by id through Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and their sequels are pivotal to the story of PC gaming. — Ryan

I believe it is an absolute must-read for anyone wanting to try to understand the mad rush to create AI for human replacements. Very readable, sometimes witty, always thought-provoking for those of us concerned with the big question of “Who controls the data and how it’s accomplished?” — John Bishop

A seminal piece of work that looks at video games as an art form and examines where they came from and where they are going. It’s an old book now, but this is probably the first serious work on them as a medium. Poole pulls apart not the development process but the invisible rules themselves that bind them together and gets to the heart of what makes games, games. — Carl James

Forget Cyberpunk: consider Sinofuturism. The future is decidedly distributed in strange ways, as Xiaowei Wang explores China’s deeply enmeshed tech from the outside of main cities. How are villagers reshaped by e-commerce platforms? How are farmers affected by the energy intensity of blockchains? — Thibaut Thomas

Y’all fucked up. Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine. This motherfucker’s been writing about technology for decades. He’s been in it. In this book, he talks about and predicts nouns becoming verbs. Uber is no longer the name of just a company. You Uber places, you Google things, you Snap someone, etc. Your list with a bunch of memoirs and one-off stories of good/shitty companies is missing this great book that discusses understanding the forces shaping technology’s future. — Ryan E

Founder of the MIT media lab talks about tech history and the future. He predicts that HD TV will become obsolete in favor of digital connected devices, that machines will predict and understand what humans prefer, that hyper personalization is imminent, and that UI/UX are key to making complicated technologies feel like magic. And by the way, he made these claims in 1995. This book is one reason why I work in technology. — Jonathan Kressaty

Come on. It’s like having a list of the greatest video games of all time and forgetting Zelda. — Jot Kailay

Hearing “capitalism breaks everything” can get a little old after a while, but that’s not because it’s wrong. Internet for the People, tracing back to the web’s material and ideological conception, shows how economic and political forces made the internet what it is today, points out where it might be going, and provides some alternative ideas similar to municipal broadband. I found it illustrative and informative. — Michael Nolan

Most tech books strive to tell a single story about a startup, usually rife with issues, that makes a product so important to society that publishers care about its narrative. Jason Schreier’s book is so good that it is not only filled to the brim with 10 different companies that could each be a book on their own, but it also interweaves the common themes from the stories to paint perhaps the most complete picture of the modern games industry ever told. — Charlie Scholey

This is a remarkable book about technology because it goes beyond mere technical details and delves into the profound human dimensions of technological advancement. Through his masterful storytelling, Wolfe captures the essence of the Space Age and the race to conquer the cosmos, intertwining it with the complex psyche of the astronauts and the immense societal impact of their endeavors. By exploring the emotional and psychological challenges faced by these pioneers, Wolfe underscores the inherent risks and sacrifices associated with pushing the boundaries of technology. — Keith Purdie

It’s a gripping tale of the rise and fall of the hacktivist collective Anonymous and their offshoot LulzSec, showing their origins in the message boards of 4chan and the intricate and wild online culture those boards created. It’s excellent reportage but also an edge-of-your-seat story of friendship, crime, and betrayal that’s hard to put down. — Marco S.

This book does a great job of explaining how artificial intelligence and machine learning actually work while demystifying the jargon that often gets thrown around. The real-world examples of how you might apply machine learning to a problem at a high level are fantastic, particularly in the section about how machine learning can’t solve what are actually social problems at their core. — Rachel Green

While being Apple-centric and, more specifically, iPhone-centric, this book gives such a longitudinal and latitudinal overview of the bigger picture that was and is required of producing these ubiquitous pocket computers. Everything from the ethics of IP and true invention to environmental accountability, this book covers a lot of ground. The section on ARM could be an article by itself, especially considering ARM’s rise to dominance. — Andrew Bowlby

Besides the fact that it’s probably the single most frequently mentioned book in the history of the Vergecast, The Master Switch is a breakdown of the philosophy and history of the technology industry. Both an analysis and a critique, it draws a single clear line through the history of companies and infrastructure that built the information networks everywhere today. It challenges us to understand that everything today is both the cutting edge of development and an endless rehash of the same old song. — Kyle Owens

This book chronicles the development of the GNU/Linux operating system. It’s an excellent read for technology folks and non-technology folks alike. Moody explains how it all came together in an engaging narrative that never talks down to the reader. — Matthew Elb

This is the thrilling story behind “the Queen of the Skies” — the Boeing 747 — as told by Joe Sutter, one of the most celebrated engineers of the twentieth century, who spearheaded its design and construction. Sutter’s vivid narrative takes us back to a time when American technology was cutting-edge and jet travel was still glamorous and new. With wit and warmth, he gives an insider’s sense of the larger-than-life-size personalities — and the tensions — in the aeronautical world. — Gonzalo Rovere Presa

This had a pretty strong impact on me when I read it as a teenager. Maybe it’s not one of the greatest tech books of all time (Stoll would later disavow it), but it’s one of the most influential for me. Ever since reading it, I’ve been on a skeptical footing about any “new” technology, especially technology that has to do with the internet. — Richard Eriksson

This book details how technology is going to dramatically change our society and culture. The ideas presented by the author are groundbreaking in scope and analysis. It is a must-read for everyone and a call to arms. We cannot ignore the dangers of what social media is doing to our society. — Roman Lys

If you love technology, you have to love hacker stories. Mitnick’s stories are exciting and educational, and despite being a criminal, you might even find yourself rooting for him. I loved this book growing up and recently revisited it. It nears the top of my list for folks looking for real-world tech thrillers. — Dan O’Connell