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Gilder's Book of the Month Archive

Gilder's Book of the Month recommended reading list ispulled from George Gilder's own library. All books are available for purchase through Amazon.com.

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New Era of WealthThe New Era of Wealth
How Investors Can Profit from the 5 Economic Trends Shaping the Future
by Brian S. Wesbury

The first book with a Telecosm List, a supply-side tilt, and a Greenspan critique, Brian Wesbury's pithy tome castigates the prevailing medianomics and offers a felicitous guide for investing in the new economy.
—GG

The Innovator's Dilemma
When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail


By Clayton M. Christensen

"The most profound and useful business book ever written about innovation, it catapults its softspoken author abruptly into the class of Burnham and Drucker."
—George Gilder, October 1998 GTR
Only the Paranoid Survive
The Threat & Promise of Strategic Inflection Points


By Andrew S. Grove

"As a strategic fact, defining the conditions of the business and the opportunities of the era, broadband is now. This is a fundamental paradigm shift-an inflection point like those described in Andy Grove's riveting new book, Only the Paranoid Survive."
—George Gilder, August 1996 GTR
Adventures of a Bystander (Trailblazers, Rediscovering the Pioneers of Business)

By Peter F. Drucker
The Effective Executive

By Peter F. Drucker

Being Digital

By Nicholas Negroponte

The Twilight of Sovereignty
How the Information Revolution is Transforming Our World


by Walter B. Wriston

The End of Money and the Struggle for Financial Privacy

by Richard W. Rahn

Former Chief Economist of the National Chamber of Commerce, Richard Rahn has peered deeply into the heated caldron of money, encryption, privacy, bandwith and bureaucracy and emerged with a stark and stormy vision of the future. This crisply written text foresees a concussive collision of new technologies and old institutions, such as banks and nations, debts and taxes, and a new world of web commerce on the other side.

Optical Networks

by Rajiv Ramaswami and Kumar N. Sivarajan

This book is a lucid and practical exposition of the optics state of the art by two protege's of Paul Green. Skip the denser math if you want and you still can deepen your knowledge of this incandescent field. You can also expose yourself to the thinking of Rajiv Ramaswami, who is moving to Silicon Valley to guide an exciting startup in optical switching, called XRos, into the frontiers of the telecosm.

Feynman and Computation
Exploring the Limits of Computers


Edited by Anthony J.G. Hey
(not to be confused with Feynman Lectures on Computation)
 
This book contains three seminal lectures by Carver Mead, who co-taught the course with Feynman, and includes many vivid recollections of and by the world's greatest physicist in interplay with the world's leading computer scientists.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
—Feynman on the Challenger disaster

Computer Architecture
A Quantitative Approach


By David A. Patterson & John L. Hennessy

A leader in the debate over the structure of tomorrow's computers, "David Patterson explained how many of the problems with current computer architecture could give way to an intelligent RAM architecture. He favors use of parallel vector processors programmable through the means familiar in vector Cray supercomputers."
—George Gilder, October 1997 GTR

Introduction to VLSI Systems

By Carver Mead & Lynn Conway

 

Feynman Lectures on Physics

By Richard P. Feynman

 

 

Analog VLSI and Neural Systems

By Carver Mead

Computer Organization and Design
The Hardware/Software Interface

By David A. Patterson & John L. Hennessy

Packet Communication

By Robert M. Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe invented ethernet and was a founder of 3Com. His 1973 doctoral dissertation, Packet Communication, is a classic text in the development of the communications protocols at the core of the Telecosm.

"In the new paradigm, the Moore's Law advance of MIPS and bits gives way to the Metcalfe's Law explosion of bandwidth." —George Gilder, August 1996 GTR

An Introduction to Information Theory
Symbols, Signals and Noise


By John R. Pierce

"Shannon's work is shrouded in hardcore math and the explanation can be skipped if you want. But it is worth getting a glimpse of his vision. It is most clearly expounded by his leading apostle, John R. Pierce of Bell Laboratories, in a book called An Introduction to Information Theory."
—George Gilder, June 1998 GTR

Fiber Optic Networks

By Paul E. Green

"the leading text on fiber networks"

—George Gilder, February 1997 GTR

The Age of Spiritual Machines
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

By Ray Kurzweil


CDMA Principles of Spread Spectrum Communication

By Andrew J. Viterbi

Viterbi presents the mathematical bridge between Shannon's theories and today's most advanced wireless technology.

"For many years, few noticed the full significance of [Shannon's] baffling message. Andrew Viterbi, the famed author of the Viterbi algorithm, now at Qualcomm, was one of the few. With Jacobs and Gilhousen, they set out to fulfill the Shannon mandate. In the Telecosm today, physics, optics, engineering, signals, and noise all are now beginning to whirl centrifugally in Shannon's hyperspace. Just as Wavelength Division Multiplexing is the wireline expression of Shannon's vision, CDMA is the wireless form of "wide and weak."
—George Gilder, June 1998 GTR

Claude Elwood Shannon
Collected Papers


By Claude E. Shannon

"As early as 1949, Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory, defined the crucial tradeoffs of a regime of bandwidth abundance. Bandwidth, he showed, can substitute both for switching and for power. The new paradigm requires that successful companies of the new era pursue this crucial trade off among the emerging technologies of sand and glass and air."
—George Gilder, July 1996 GTR

"The great astronomer and physicist Kepler wrote: "I cherish more than anything else the Analogies.They know all the secrets of nature." For the Microcosm, the model was to move to the center of the sphere, at the atomic level, where power was concentrated. With an uncanny analogy of communications to multi-dimensional geometry, however, Claude Shannon in 1948 supplied a new spherical analogy for the Telecosm. An MIT professor with close ties to Bell Laboratories, he developed information theory to gauge the potential capacity of any communications channel in the presence of noise. This work took the theory of the Telecosm from the center of the sphere, where power was unlimited and bandwidth scarce, to the surface of the sphere, where the results were weirdly wide and weak and counterintuitive."
—George Gilder, June 1998 GTR