Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine

Though in places a bit heavy-going for a non-specialist readership, SDIMM is a first-rate introduction to the information sciences. As an overview of state-of-the-art technology, SDIMM may be dated, but the problems it describes are timeless -- and fascinating. Anyone interested in how information is measured, moved, and translated to the media of minds/brains and computers, would do well to read this exceptional book. Here's hoping RL makes future contributions to the popular science literature.

Althought this book has been written 20 years ago, it is still very fresh today. The bandwidth with which we communicate, and our capacity for storing information have increased in the intervening years, however the fundamental questions that are addressed here have not changed much. In the first couple chapters, the author starts with a very precise definition of what information and capacity mean. This part is merely 50 pages in length, but makes this book worth owning on its own - I wish somebody gave it to me when I was learning about information theory. The remainder of the book is devided into chapters dealing with different aspects of information: text, speech and pictures, including problems associated with their storage, processing and intrepretation. The presentation is insightful, informative, and, given that it is addressed to an audience of non-mathematicians, surprisingly precise. Each chapter ends with a ligh-hearted essay, some of which I found to be deceptively deep and insightful.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I'd strongly recommend this book for anybody interested in how things have evolved in computing. Great insight into stuff we take for granted like compression algorithms, error correction.

I read this book over and over and love it every time. It covers topics that I teach from the standard texts, but it covers them in a way that makes it all make so much more sense to my students. This truly is an amazing book!

This is a popular computer book about data compression and data representation. It was first published way back in 1989 and now eleven years later it's not in the slightest bit out of date. How many popular computer books can you say that about?