"The most interesting book ever written about Google" (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword. Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students-Larry Page and Sergey Brin-has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business. Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google's success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google's relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy-and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google's rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. In the Plex is the "most authoritative...and in many ways the most entertaining" (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers "an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world's most influential internet company function" (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).

Rashi, the medieval French rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (1040-1105), authored monumental commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Babylonian Talmud. With The JPS Rashi Discussion Torah Commentary, his commentary on the Torah-regarded as the most authoritative of all Torah commentaries-is finally accessible to the entire Jewish community. Steven and Sarah Levy quote from the biblical text in both Hebrew and English, highlight Rashi's comments relating to the parashah, and delve into his perceptive moral messages in the context of twenty-first-century dilemmas. Each portion features three essays with analysis and discussion questions that draw on universal human experiences, enabling families and Shabbat study groups to deepen their understanding of Rashi and the portion over the three Sabbath meals. Readers with little or no knowledge of Hebrew, the Torah, or Jewish practice will feel comfortable diving into this discussion commentary. All Hebrew terms are defined, quoted verses contextualized, and less familiar Jewish concepts explained.

The year's best writing on tech: a collection as imaginative and compelling as its dynamic subject. Together these essays capture the versatility and verve of technology writing today. Solicited through an open online nominating process, ""The Best of Technology 2007"" explores a wide range of intriguing topics - from ""crowdsourcing"" to the online habits of urban moms to the digital future of movie production. It will appeal to anyone who enjoys stellar writing.

'Levy portrays a tech company where no one is taking responsibility for what it has unleashed' Financial Times 'This fascinating book reveals the imperial ambitions of Facebook's founder' James Marriott, Sunday Times 'The inside story of how Facebook went from idealism to scandal' Laurence Dodds, Telegraph Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from the simple website Zuckerberg's first built from his dorm room in his Sophomore year. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the biggest companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in daily life. And in light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing fake news accounts, the handling of its users' personal data and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO, never has the company been more central to the national conversation. Based on years of exclusive reporting and interviews with Facebook's key executives and employees, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Levy's sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.

Steven Levy's classic book about the original hackers of the computer revolution is now available in a special 25th anniversary edition, with updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Tim O'Reilly. Hackers traces the exploits of innovators from the research labs in the late 1950s to the rise of the home computer in the mid-1980s. It's a fascinating story of brilliant and eccentric nerds such as Steve Wozniak, Ken Williams, and John Draper who took risks, bent the rules, and took the world in a radical new direction. "Hacker" is often a derogatory term today, but 40 years ago, it referred to people who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems -- a practice that became known as "the hacker ethic." In this book, Levy takes you from the true hackers of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club to the DIY culture that spawned the first personal computers -- the Altair and the Apple II -- and finally to the gaming culture of the early '80s. From students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to engineers uncovering the secrets of what would become the Internet, Hackers captures a seminal period in history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world. This book is not just for geeks -- it's for everyone interested in origins of the computer revolution.

The iPod has become a full-blown cultural phenomenon, giving us a new vocabulary (we shuffle our iTunes on our nanos), revolutionizing the way we experience music and radio through the invention of podcasting, opening up new outlets for video, and challenging the traditional music industry as never before. The design itself has become iconic: there is even a shade of white now called iPod White.

Steven Levy has had rare access to everyone at Apple who was involved in creating the iPod -- including Steve Jobs, Apple's charismatic cofounder and CEO, whom he has known for over twenty years. In telling the story behind the iPod, Levy explains how it went from the drawing board to global sensation. He also examines how this deceptively diminutive gadget raises a host of new technical, legal, social, and musical questions (including the all-important use of one's playlist as an indicator of coolness), and writes about where the iPhenomenon might go next in his new Afterword. Sharp and insightful, "The Perfect Thing" is part history and part homage to the device that we can't live without.

This enthralling book alerts us to nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS.

What these species have in common is that they exist inside computers, their DNA is digital, and they have come into being not through God's agency but through the efforts of a generation of scientists who seek to create life in silico.

But even as it introduces us to these brilliant heretics and unravels the intricacies of their work. Artificial Life examines its subject's dizzying philosophical implications: Is a self-replicating computer program any less alive than a flu virus? Are carbon-and-water-based entities merely part of the continuum of living things? And is it possible that one day "a-life" will look back at human beings and dismiss us as an evolutionary way station -- or, worse still, a dead end?

This new study interprets on of the least known fronts of the First World War---the Alaska Territory. Because of its vast size and small population Alaska was governed and ruled by overlapping military (mostly naval)and civilian authorities all of whom waged a successful bloody war against---mostly US citizens. Levi describes the unions, German workers and merchants and socialist associations that were suppressed and demonized between 1915 and 1920. The grip of so-called "nativist" authorities also extended to stealing land from Indians and Eskimos, false imprisonment, strike and union breaking. It is an extraordinary historical record and one that Levi characterizes as springing from genuine elite panic at the changes that unions, socialists, and civil libertarians threatened to bring to the goldfields, lumbering towns and fishing fleets of the territory. Truly a civil war within a world war as one contemporary described it.

Steven Levi discusses and analyzes the rise and fall of the last of the old western vigilance committees - and the rise of the first modern American committee devoted to ferreting out 'Un- American activities' among the laboring poor, union leaders, progressive politicians and social activists. The Preparedness Day bombing of 1916 was the catalyst (along with the "Los Angeles Times" bombing several years earlier) for full scale civic strife and class violence in San Francisco. The committee railroaded two men to the death house - Tom Mooney and Warren Billings - and their cause became one of the most celebrated in Socialist and Communist movements throughout the world in the 20's and 30's. Levi has done more research on the bombing and its polarizing aftermath since his first research monograph 30 years ago. This work includes new material on terror and American culture as well discussions of material that has only become public in the last few decades.

Cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers, is of huge importance today: codes are essential to the secure use of the internet, mobile phones and all kinds of electronic transactions (credit cards etc). Crypto traces the devlopment of the mathematical science of cryptography, and describes the conflicts that have developed between those who want to keep codes weak - basically government agencies, who want the option of peeking in - and those hackers outside government who want strong code available to all, to protect privacy. Afterall, if privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.