The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital

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  1. Nice collection and synthesis of digital processing topics – somewhat technical
    I was attracted to the book by the suggestion in the [sub] title that it was going to be about digital audio, since I’ve been a dabbler in digital recording for some time. But, that is not really the topic of the book, since it ranges over quite a bit of the breadth of the analog to digital (and back) transition that has occurred in all areas within recent years. But, as a former comp sci guy who lived and worked through a fair amount of the history covered in this book, I found it accessible and very interesting.Now, as to organization, well, it reads a lot like it was assembled from essays that had been written over a span of time and edited and arranged into a book. That was done well, but it may not flow as smoothly as some would like.The technical information is probably a hurdle for some readers. Since it was familiar to me, though at times a distant, fuzzy familarity, it didn’t become impossibly dense. The author does suggest in places some of the more gritty formulas and like can be skipped if too complex, but I expect that’s going to make a complete reading feel disconnected. (I didn’t come to the end of this book feeling like I did at, say, “A Brief History of Time,” where I was just flipping pages, but it was in my domain, more or less. Others may find it less accessible.)

  2. Fascinating and Detailed
    This book is wonderfully written. So far (I’m a few chapters in), it’s like a course in Digital Signal Processing, without any of the homework. If you are very curious about this topic and require almost excruciating levels of detail to satisfy said curiosity, buy this book!

  3. Well done
    An incredible journey from vacuum tubes to quantum computing with a stop over for NP-Complete problems, which made my little data scientist heart go pitter pat. If you enjoy computers, their history, how they work, and why they evolved as they did, then I highly recommend this book.

  4. The book starts very well, not aiming too high, with reasonably clear introduction to the world of digital computers and with a very basic reader in mind. Essentially it gives a basic introduction to the fundamental physics of modern digital transistors and explains why digital is superior to analog when transmitting data.A warning on this statement is that I am very familiar with these subject and I do not read them with the mind of the newcomer, so perhaps I have a ‘positively’ biased view here.The problem starts in the second half (Part III) of the book (on topics where I am less familiar) when the author tries to explain more conceptually sophisticated issues such as “computation complexity”, the Turing machine, NP completeness, quantum computers and the like. None of these concepts is clearly explained and Einstein’s recommendation of “Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler” is totally ignored. I do not think anyone – if not already familiar with these issues – can come out claiming any understanding of these problems and one is left with a sense of profound frustration with this book.I went back to an older book with a very similar content (G. W. Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature) and I find this last book infinitely clearer and better written if one wants to get a feeling of what is going on with some of these modern fundamental issues, despite the fact that quantum computers are not discussed.

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