Books about Silicon from Amazon.com

The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader. With color and humor, Rich Mironov gives us a taste of Silicon Valley's tireless pursuit of great technology and its creation of new products. He provides strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals about start-ups, big organizations, how to think like a customer, and what things should cost. He also reminds us to love our products and our teams. The Art of Product Management brings together the best insights from more than seven years of Product Bytes, Rich Mironov's long-running series on product strategy, technology companies, and how the two interact. This collection is for everyone who builds or markets the next new thing. This is more a how to think about products book than how to templates. Product managers (and others who are deeply committed to great products) will recognize themselves and their daily process struggles. How do I think about customers and solutions? Why does my organization behave the way it does? Can I help others to think long-term, or do I need to think for them? This book captures the inner life of product champions..
Price: $21.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As American capitalism undergoes a seismic shift, Michael Lewis, author of the bestselling Liar's Poker, sets out on a Silicon Valley safari to find the true representative of the coming economic age. All roads lead to Jim Clark, the man who rewrote the rules of American capitalism as the founder of (so far) three multi-billion dollar companies-Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. Lewis's shrewd, often brilliantly funny, narrative provides ahead-of-the-curve observations about the Internet explosion and how the success of Silicon Valley companies is forcing a reassessment of traditional Wall-Street business models.

Weaving Clark's story together with that of this new business phenomenon, Lewis has drawn us a map of markets and free enterprise in the twenty-first century and blown the lid off the changing economy..
Price: $2.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The captivating story of the mavericks who emerged from the dotcom rubble to found the multibillion-dollar companies taking the Web into the twenty-first century

Everyone has heard the story of the Internet Bubble. Beginning with Netscape’s IPO in 1996, billions flowed into Internet startups, and companies with no revenues and shaky business plans earned sky-high valuations on Wall Street. It was the era of paper millionaires, $800 office chairs, and Super Bowl ads for dotcoms. Then in 2000 the Bubble burst, with the NASDAQ losing 75 percent of its value and hundreds of companies closing up shop. It was all written off to “irrational exuberance,” and everyone moved on.

Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good is the story of the entrepreneurs who learned their lesson from the bust and in recent years have created groundbreaking new Web companies. The second iteration of the dotcoms—dubbed Web 2.0—is all about bringing people together. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace unite friends online; YouTube lets anyone posts videos for the world to see; Digg.com allows Internet users to vote on the most relevant news of the day; Six Apart sells software that enables bloggers to post their viewpoints online; and Slide helps people customize their virtual selves.

Business reporter Sarah Lacy brings to light the entire Web 2.0 scene: the wide-eyed but wary entrepreneurs, the hated venture capitalists, the bloggers fueling the hype, the programmers coding through the night, the twenty-something millionaires, and the Internet “fan boys” eager for all the promises to come true..
Price: $2.89 [Notify me when price goes down.]

VHDL, the IEEE standard hardware description language for describing digital electronic systems, has recently been revised This book has become a standard in the industry for learning the features of VHDL and using it to verify hardware designs. This third edition is the first comprehensive book on the market to address the new features of VHDL-2008.

* First comprehensive book on VHDL to incorporate all new features of VHDL-2008, the latest release of the VHDL standard...helps readers get up to speed quickly with new features of the new standard.
* Presents a structured guide to the modeling facilities offered by VHDL...shows how VHDL functions to help design digital systems.
* Includes extensive case studies and source code used to develop testbenches and case study examples..helps readers gain maximum facility with VHDL for design of digital systems..
Price: $55.35 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is the practical survival guide for every CIO and IT manager who is fighting the battle to do more with less. Covers everything from budgeting and measuring, to planning, sourcing, and architecture Each chapter is introduced with a real-life story that shows how the common themes that have emerged from each author's unique experiences are related. The critical skills that every IT manager needs to master are covered in detail with real-life insights and practical examples. Whether your IT organization is wrestling with outsourcing maintenance issues, or critical infrastructure problems, the solutions you need can be found in this book..
Price: $19.92 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As the dominant venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, Tom Perkins had seemingly done it all—from amassing a billion-dollar fortune to getting himself convicted of manslaughter in France. But his ultimate dream was to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever built.

With keen storytelling and biting wit, bestselling author David A. Kaplan takes us inside the mind of an American genius and behind the scenes of an extraordinary venture: the birth of Perkins's $130 million marvel The Maltese Falcon. This modern clipper ship is as long as a football field and forty-two feet wide, with three rotating masts, each twenty stories high, and a bridge straight out of Star Trek. The riveting biography of a remarkable ship and the remarkable man who built it, Mine's Bigger is an unforgettable profile of ambition, hubris, audacity, and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur.

.
Price: $6.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Computer manufacturing is--after cars, energy production and illegal drugs--the largest industry in the world, and it's one of the last great success stories in American business. Accidental Empires is the trenchant, vastly readable history of that industry, focusing as much on the astoundingly odd personalities at its core--Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor, etc. and the hacker culture they spawned as it does on the remarkable technology they created. Cringely reveals the manias and foibles of these men (they are always men) with deadpan hilarity and cogently demonstrates how their neuroses have shaped the computer business. But Cringely gives us much more than high-tech voyeurism and insider gossip. From the birth of the transistor to the mid-life crisis of the computer industry, he spins a sweeping, uniquely American saga of creativity and ego that is at once uproarious, shocking and inspiring.

.
Price: $4.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

You get sick; you go to your doctor. Too bad. Because medicine isn't an industry, it's practically witchcraft. Despite the growth of big pharma, HMOs, and hospital chains, medicine remains the isolated work of individual doctors—and the system is going broke fast.

So why is Andy Kessler—the man who told you outrageous stories of Wall Street analysts gone bad in Wall Street Meat and tales from inside a hedge fund in Running Money—poking around medicine for the next big wave of technology?

It's because he smells change coming. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are a huge chunk of medical spending, yet there's surprisingly little effort to detect disease before it's life threatening. How lame is that—especially since the technology exists today to create computer-generated maps of your heart and colon?

Because it's too expensive—for now. But Silicon Valley has turned computing, telecom, finance, music, and media upside down by taking expensive new technologies and making them ridiculously cheap. So why not the $1.8 trillion health care business, where the easiest way to save money is to stop folks from getting sick in the first place?

Join Kessler's bizarre search for the next big breakthrough as he tries to keep from passing out while following cardiologists around, cracks jokes while reading mammograms, and watches twitching mice get injected with radioactive probes. Looking for a breakthrough, Kessler even selflessly pokes, scans, and prods himself.

CT scans of your heart will identify problems before you have a heart attack or stroke; a nanochip will search your blood for cancer cells--five years before they grow uncontrollably and kill you; and baby boomers can breathe a little easier because it's all starting to happen now.

Your doctor can't be certain what's going on inside your body, but technology will. Embedding the knowledge of doctors in silicon will bring a breakout technology to health care, and we will soon see an end of medicine as we know it.

.
Price: $1.62 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Desi Land is Shalini Shankar's lively ethnographic account of South Asian American teen culture during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Shankar focuses on how South Asian Americans, or "Desis," define and manage what it means to be successful in a place brimming with the promise of technology. Between 1999 and 2001 Shankar spent many months "kickin' it" with Desi teenagers at three Silicon Valley high schools, and she has since followed the lives and stories of these teens. The diverse high-school students who populate Desi Land are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs from South Asia and other locations; they include first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents' careers vary from assembly-line workers to engineers and CEOs. By analyzing how Desi teens' conceptions and realization of success are influenced by community values, cultural practices, language use, and material culture, she offers a nuanced portrait of diasporic formations in a transforming urban region.

Whether discussing instant messaging or arranged marriages, Desi bling or the pressures of the model minority myth, Shankar foregrounds the teens' voices, perspectives, and stories. She investigates how Desi teens interact with dialogue and songs from Bollywood films as well as how they use their heritage language in ways that inform local meanings of ethnicity while they also connect to a broader South Asian diasporic consciousness. She analyzes how teens negotiate rules about dating and reconcile them with their longer-term desire to become adult members of their communities. In Desi Land Shankar not only shows how Desi teens of different socioeconomic backgrounds are differently able to succeed in Silicon Valley schools and economies but also how such variance affects meanings of race, class, and community for South Asian Americans..
Price: $16.52 [Notify me when price goes down.]