Bret Victor’s bookshelf

This is a transcription of (almost) all the books on Bret’s shelf (circa 2015). I will try to add all the author names and purchase links someday in the future.

comics

• Understanding comics - Scott McCloud
• Reinventing comics - Scott McCloud
• Making comics - Scott McCloud
• Graphic storytelling and visual narrative - Will Eisner
• Comics and sequential art - Will Eisner
• The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics - Mark Chiarello and Todd Klein
• Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel - Steven Weiner
• How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way - Stan Lee and John Buscema
• The Visual Language of Comics - Neil Cohn
• Perspective! For Comic Book Artists
• The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking
• Chris Ware - Daniel Raeburn
• Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman

animation

• The Illusion of Life - Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston
• How to make animated films - Tony White
• Grammar of the Film Language - Daniel Arijon
• 3D Art Essentials - Ami Chopine
• 3D Animation Essentials - Andy Beane

game design

• on game design - Chris Crawford
• Racing the Beam - Montfort and Bogost
• How to do things with video games - Bogost
• Homo Ludens - Johan Huizinga
• A Theory of Fun for game design - Koster

type

• The Non-designer’s Type Book - Robin Williams

• The Splendour of Islamic Calligraphy -

• The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst

• The Secret History of Letters - Simon Loxley

• Calligraphy - Arthur Baker

• Dream Machine - Ted Nelson

• The Last Whole Earth Catalog - Stewart Brand

• Whole Earth Epilog

• The Next Whole Earth Catalog

• Whole Earth

• Whole Earth Software Catalog 1.0

• What To Do After You Hit Return - Dave Kaufman

media

• Understanding Media - Marshall Mcluhan
• Narrative Across Media - Marie-Laure Ryan
• The Bias of Communication - Harold Innis
• The printing press as an agent of change I & II - Elizabeth Eisenstein
• Media and symbols: the forms of expression, communication, and education - David Olsen
• The Domestication of the Savage Mind - Jack Goody
• Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong

the new medium

• Hamlet on the Holodeck - Janet Murray
• Computers as Theatre - Brenda Laurel
• Dream Machines/Computer Lib - Ted Nelson
• Literary Machines 93.1 - Ted Nelson
• Mirror Worlds -
• The Human Interface
• Libraries of the Future - Licklider
• Future Libraries - Bloch and Hesse
• Persuasive Games - Bogost
• Simulacra and Simulation - Baudrillard
• From Memes to Hypertext
• Artificial Reality II
• Software Takes Command
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A complete framework - Douglas Engelbart

history of math

• Mathematics and its’ History -
• Ways of thought of great mathematicians
• A Concise History of Mathematics
• Journey Through Genius
• A History of Chinese Mathematics: Donald Coxeter, the man who saved geometry
• King of Infinite Space
• Chaos
• The Lady Tasting Tea
• Henri Poincare - Gray
• Henri Poincare - Springer
• Emergence of the Theory of Lie Groups: An essay in the history of mathematics 1869–1926 - Hawkins
• The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved - Mario Livio
• Science Awakening: Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek mathematics
• Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty

history of numbers and notation

• The Universal History of Numbers
• ZERO - Charles Seife
• An Imaginary Tale: The story of - Nahin
• Gamma - Havill
• Number Words and Number Symbols: A cultural history of numbers
• A History of Mathematical Notations
• Enlightening Symbols
• Numbers - Ebbinghaus et al
• Before Writing (vol. 1): From counting to cruciform - Schmandt Besserat
• Before Writing (vol. 2): A catalog of near Eastern tokens - Schmandt Besserat
• The History of Counting - Schmandt Besserat/Hays

history of science

• The Discoverers - Daniel J. Boorstin
• Hidden Histories of Science -
• The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science -
• The Man Who Saw Through Time -
• A History of Mechanical Inventions -
• The Clockwork Universe - Edward Dolnick
• Longitude - Dava Sobel
• John Van Neumann - Norman Macrae
• Renaissance Engineers form Brunelleschi to Leonardo da Vinci
• Oliver Heaviside - Nahin
• The Maxwellians - Bruce Hunt
• A Force of Nature - Richard Reeves
• Tesla: Man out of time - Margaret Cheney
• The Mystery of Metamorphosis - Ryan
• A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
• Genius - James Gleick
• Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code - Matt Ridley
• Warmth Disperses and Time Passes -
• Suspended in Language - Ottavani & Purvis
• A Feeling of the Organism - Keller
• The Birth of the Modern - Paul Johnson
• Great Physicists -
• Leonardo da Vinci - Codex Leicester
• Time and Timekeepers - Adam Thomson
• The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World
• John Dalton and the Atom - Frank Greenaway
• Laser - Nick Taylor
• The Copernican Revolution -
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes
• The Victorian Internet - Tom Standage
• Wind Wizard - Roberts
• Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field - Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon
• Einstein - Walter Isaacson
• Innovation in Telecommunication 1925–1977

interface design

• The Essentials of Interface Design - Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, Hugh Dubberly
• The Art of Interface Design - Crawford
• Designing Interactions - Bill Moggeridge
• The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design -
• The Humane Interface - Raskin

industrial design

• human engineering guide for Equipment Designers (2nd edition)
• Designing of People - Dreyfuss
• Cradle to Cradle
• The Design of Everyday Things = Donald Norman
• Small Things Considered - Henry Petroski

visual design

• Understanding Color (2nd edition)
• Interaction of Color - Josef Albers
• The Nature and Art of Workmanship - David Pye
• Logic & Design - Barratt
• A History of Graphic Design -
• Universal Principles of Design
• The Non-designer’s Design Book (2nd edition) - Rodin Williams

visual thinking

• The Nature and Aesthetics of Design - David Pye
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards
• Visual Thinking -
• Art and Visual Perception: The Psychology of the Creative Eye
• The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry
• The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
• Laws of Seeing - Metzger
• On the Rationalization of Sight
• The back of the napkin - Dan Roam
• Unflattening -

information design

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd edition) - Edward Tufte
• Envisioning Information - Edward Tufte
• Visual Explanation - Edward Tufte
• Beautiful Evidence - Edward Tufte
• Graphic Discovery
• Show Me the Numbers: Designing tables and graphs to enlighten
• Information Dashboard Design - Displaying data for at-a-glance monitoring
• The Commercial and Political Arts and Statistical Breviary -
• The Elements of Graphing Data
• Visualizing Data - William Cleveland
• Semiology of Graphics - Jaques Bertin
• Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information - Manual Lima
• The Book of Trees - Manual Lima
• Information Graphics - A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference - Harris
• Graph Design for the Eye and Mind
• The Grammar of Graphics
• Carographies of Time - Rosenberg and Grafton
• On the Map - Simon Garfield
• EDA - Tukey
• Cartographic Relief Presentation - Edward Imhof
• The Collected Works of John W. Tukey: Time Series 1949 –1964
• The Collected Works of John W. Tukey: Philosophy and Principles of Data Analysis 1985–1988
• The Collected Works of John W. Tukey: Graphics 1965–1985

the mind

• Frames of Mind - Gardner
• Origins of the Modern Mind - Donald
• Godel, Escher, Back: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
• The Large, the Small and the Human Mind -
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
• Flow -
• The Master and his Emissary - Iain McGilchrist
• The Quest for Consciousness - Koch
• In Search of Memory: The emergence of a new science of mind - Eric Kandel
• The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
• On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins
• Mind Wide Open - Steven Johnson
• The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore

concepts & metaphors

• Understanding Computers and Cognition -
• Fluid Concepts and Creative Metaphors - Douglas Hofstadter
• Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire to Thinking - Hofstadter & Sander
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things - George Lakoff
• The Symbolic Species - Terrence Deacon
• Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
• The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexity
• Origins of Human Communication -

architecture

• Introduction to Architecture - Ching Eckler
• A Visual Dictionary of Architecture (2nd edition)
• How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand
• How to Read Bridges
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form - Christopher Alexander
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
• A Pattern Language -
• The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

writing

• Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way - Bill Bryson
• Language Myths -
• Stein on Writing - Sol Stein
• Maps of the Imagination: The writer as cartographer - Peter Turchi
• The Devil’s Dictionary -
• The Art of Description -
• all the fun’s in how you say a thing: An explanation of Meter and Versification - Steele
• The Careful Writer: A modern guide to English usage - Theodore Bernstein
• Roget’s International Thesaurus (4th edition)
• Webster’s Ninth College Dictionary

creativity & ideas

• Common as Air - Lewis Hyde
• Making Ideas Happen - Scott Belsky
• The Gift: Creativity and the Artists of the Modern World - Lewis Hyde
• Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson
• The Artist’s Way
• Good Work
• The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler

scientific creativity

• How to Solve It - Polya
• Induction and Analogy in Mathematics
• Patterns of Plausible Inference
• Mathematical Discovery: On Understanding, Learning and Teaching Problem Solving
• And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared - Altshuller
• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - Richard Hammond
• Creating Scientific Concepts -
• The Englebart Hypothesis
• What Engineers Know and How They Know It -

philosophy of science

• The Structure of Scientific Revolution - Thomas Kuhn
• The Road Since Structure - Thomas Kuhn
• What is this thing called Science? - Chalmers
• Scientific Discovery -
• Against Method - Paul Feyerabend
• The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination - Bronowski
• Reliable Knowledge - John Ziman
• The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd edition) - Simon
• Science in Action - Bruno
• Laboratory Life - Latour Woolgar

probability & AI

• Theory of Probability (2nd edition) - Jeffreys
• Probability Theory - Jaynes
• Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial (2nd edition)
• Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach - Stuart Russel & Peter Norvig
• [book missing here]
• Probabilistic Graphical Models - Koller and Friedman
• Perceptions (expanded edition) - Minsky and Papert
• Machine Learning -
• Heuristics: Intelligent search strategies for computer solving

systems and modelling

• The Systems Bible - John Gall
• General Principles of Systems Design - Weinberg & Weinberg
• An Introduction to General Systems
• Theory of Modelling and Simulation
• Dynamics of Physical Systems
• Introduction to Engineering Design - Woodson
• Theory of Mathematical Modelling
• Alternate Realities: Mathematical models of nature and man
• Living Control Systems: The Fact of Control - William Powers
• Six Degrees - Duncan Watts
• Emergence - Steven Johnson
• Cybernetics (2nd edition) - Norbert Wiener
• Cybennatics and Society: The Human Use of Human Beings - Norbert Wiener
• Selected Papers of Norbert Wiener

programming languages

• APL: The Language and its usage
• The Design and Evolution of C++ - Stroustrup
• The Annotated C++ Reference Manual
• The Joy of Clojure
• EIFFEL - Bertrand Myer
• Programming Erlang - Joe Armstrong
• Forth - W.P. Salman, O. Tisserand and B. Toulout
• Thinking Forth - Leo Brodie
• Introduction Forth - B. C. Plumb
• The Little Schemer - Friedman and Felleisen
• The Seasoned Schemer - Friedman and Felleisen
• The Reasoned Schemer - Friedman, Byrd, and Kiselyov
• The Little MLer - Friedman and Felleisen
• Programming in Lua - Roberto Ierusalimschy
• Lucid, the Dataflow Programming Language
• Functional Programming in Scala
• Clause and Effect - Clocksin
• Sketchpad - Sutherland
• Smalltalk-80: The interactive programming environment
• Smalltalk-80: Bits of history, words of advice
• Smalltalk-80: The language - Goldberg Robson
• The TeXbook - Donald Knuth
• The METAFONTbook - Donald Knuth
• TeX: The Problem - Donald Knuth
• Viewpoint: Toward a Computer for Visual Thinkers
• Visual Grammars for Visual Languages - Fred Lakin

music theory

• Harmonic Experience
• On the Sensations of Tone - Helmholtz
• Temperament - Stuart Isacoff
• How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony - Ross Duffin
• Coreo-graphics -
• Traces of Dance -

persuasion

• Made to Stick - Chip Heath & Dan Heath
• Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life - Stuart Diamond
• Switch - Chip Heath & Dan Heath
• Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping - Paco Underhill
• Influence - Robert Cialdini

management

• The innovator’s Dilemma - Clayton Christensen
• The Essential Drucker - Peter Drucker
• Peopleware (2nd edition) - DeMarco & Lister
• The Design of Design - Brooks
• The Mythical Man-Month - Brooks

technology + culture

• What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly
• Out of Control - Kevin Kellt
• The Nature of Technology - W. Brian Arthur
• Amusing Ourselves to Death - Niel Postman
• Technopoly - Niel Postman
• Convergence Culture - jenkins
• Here Comes Everybody: The power of organising without organization - Clay Shirkey
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined - Weinberger
• Remix - Lawrence Lessig
• Code and other laws of cyberspace - Lessig
• The Future of Ideas - Lawrence Lessio
• Computers and Society - Hamming
• The Coming of the Body - Herve Juvin
• The Condition of Man - Mumford
• Technics and Civilization - Mumford
• The Identity of man - Jacob Bronowski
• Interface Culture -
• Computer Power and Human Reason -
• The Computer Age - Dertouzos and Moses
• Science and Human Values -
• [missing book]
• From Satori to Silicon Valley -
• The Cult of Information -
• The Clock of the Long Now - Stewart Brand
• Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology - K. Eric Drexler
• Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (2nd edition)
• Superintelligence - Nick Borstrom
• Science Is Not Enough - Vannevar Bush
• Seem to be a Verb =
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth -
• Utopia or Oblivion - Buckminster Fuller
• Synthetics - Buckminster Fuller

signal processing

• Signals & Systems (2nd edition) - Oppenheim, Willsky & Hawab
• Discrete-time Signal Processing - Oppenheim Schafer
• Multirate Systems and Filter Banks - Vaidyanathan

information theory

• Elements of Information Theory
• An Introduction to Analog and Digital Communications - Haykin
• Introduction to Data Compression -
• Information and Randomness (2nd edition)
• Grammatical Man

graphics

• 3D Computer Graphics (2nd edition)

• 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development (2nd edition)

• The Nature of Code - Daniel Shiffman

• Introduction to Applied Numerical Analysis - Hamming

• Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers (2nd edition) - Hamming

• Convex Optimization - Stephen Boyd and Vendenberghe

programming

• How to Design Programs -
• Design Patterns -
• The Art of the Metaobject Protocol -
• Elements of Programming -
• Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming -
• Structure and Interpretation and Computer Programs (2nd edition) - Abelson and Sussman
• Types and Programming Languages -
• Essentials of Programming Languages (3rd edition) - Friedman and Wand
• Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation - Muchnik
• Introduction to Algorithms (2nd edition) -
• Hacker’s Delight - Warren
• Programming Pearls (2nd edition) -
• Coders at Work -
• Computation: Finite and infinite machines -
• Purely Functional Data Structures -
• The Space and Motion of Communicating Agents - Milner
• Superdistribution - Cox
• A Small Matter of Programming - Nardi
• Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists

ecology

• ecocities: Building cities in balance with nature -
• The Ecology of Commerce - Paul Hawkin
• The World Without Us - Alan Weisman
• Whole Earth Catalogue - Stewart Brand
• Sustainable Energy: Without the hot air - David MacKay
• Don’t Even Think About It - George Marshall
• Our Choice - Al Gore

culture

• No Logo - Naomi Klein
• Deschooling Society - Ivan Illich
• Disabling professions - Ivan Illich
• Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich
• The Omega Seed - Paolo Soleri
• Confessions of an Economic Hitman - John Perkins
• Born to Buy - Juliet Schor
• The Naked Ape - Desmond Morris
• The Savage Mind - Claude Levi-Strauss
• The Disappearance of Childhood - Postman
• The Making of Human Existence - Eward Wilson
• Seeing Like a State - James Scott
• Reassembling the Social - Latour
• The Power of Myth -

cultural history

• A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn
• Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
• Collapse: How societies Choose To Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond
• Lies My Teacher Told Me - James Loewen
• Thinking In Time: The Uses Of History For Decision Makers - Richard E. Neustadt & Ernest R. May
• Centuries of Change: Which century saw the most change and why it matters to us - Ian Mortimer

circuit design

• Fields and Waves in Communication Electronics - amo, Whinnery, and Van Duzer
• Analog Integrated Circuit Design - Johns & Martin
• Analysis and Design of Analog Integrated Circuits (3rd edition) - Gray & Meyer
• Analog Circuit Design: Art, science and personalities - Williams
• Digital Integrated Circuits: A design perspective - Rabaey
• Logic Synthesis - Devadas, Ghosh, and Keutzer
• Introduction to VLSI systems - Mead & Conway
• Analog VLSI and Neural Systems - Mead

architecture and OSS

• Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (2nd edition) - Hennessy & Patterson
• The Architecture of Symbolic Computers - Kogge
• The Design of the UNIX Operating System - Bach
• Modern Operating Systems (2nd edition) - Tanenbaum
• Capability-based Computer Systems - Levy
• Hard Real-Time Computer Systems: Predictable scheduling algorithms and applications -

physics

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol 1, 2, and 3) - Richard Feynman
• Six Easy pieces - Richard Feynman
• New Foundations for Classical Mechanics (2nd edition) - David Hestenes
• Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - Sussman and Wisdom
• A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Three-Body Problem - Mattuck
• The Universe in a Nutshell - Stephen Hawking
• The Illustrated A Brief History of time - Stephen Hawking
• Relativity Visualized - Epstein
• Collective Electrodynamics - Mead
• The Quark and the Jaguar - Gell-Man
• The Science of Radio - Paul Nahin
• Dreams of a Final Theory - Steven Weinberg
• The Sun, the Egnome, & the Internet - Dyson
• From Being to Becoming - Prigogine

biology

• On Growth and Form: The complete revised edition - Thompson
• The Red Queen: Sex and evolution of human nature - Matt Ridley
• Genome - Matt Ridley
• The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
• Biopunk: Solving Biotech’s Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages = Marcus Wohlsen
• Monkeyluv: And other essays on out lives as animals - Robert sapolsky
• Biocosm - James Gardner
• Human Universals - Brown
• The Stuff of Life - Schultz, Cannon & Cannon
• The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins

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