An elementary text-book on steam engines and boilers. For the use of students in schools and colleges

The earlier chapters answer questions we have probably all thought about. What makes a startup succeed? Will technology create a gap between those who understand it and those who don't? What do programmers do? Why do kids who can't master high school end up as some of the most powerful people in the world? Will Microsoft take over the Internet? What to do about spam? Several later chapters are about something most people outside the computer world haven't thought about: programming languages. Why should you care about programming languages? Because if you want to understand hacking, this is the thread to follow—just as, if you wanted to understand the technology of 1880, steam engines were the thread to follow. Computer programs are all just text. And the language you choose determines what you can say. Programming languages are what programmers think in. Naturally, this has a big effect on the kind of thoughts they have. And you can see it in the software they write. Orbitz, the travel web site, managed to break into a market dominated by two very formidable competitors: Sabre, who owned electronic reservations for decades, and Microsoft ...»