James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and...
James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. -- From the Hardcover edition.
原书英文名为 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood，直译过来是：《信息：一段历史，一个理论，一场洪流》。利用四个名词及其背后映射的意义空间来概括全书，中文版直接压缩为「简史」，损失了很多意味。作者詹姆斯·格雷克为著名的科普畅销书作家，本书让他花费了...
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![[美国] 詹姆斯·格雷克](https://img1.doubanio.com/img/author/medium/public/1522740250.29.jpg)
詹姆斯·格雷克 作者
系衍
人民邮电出版社2013版
optman
人民邮电出版社2013版
虚舟
人民邮电出版社2013版
iamsujie
人民邮电出版社2013版
Wattskemov
人民邮电出版社2013版
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人民邮电出版社2013版
1 有用 Lee 2014-02-20 22:38:04
作者论述主题采取的角度之广阔令我惊叹，但角度的广阔也造成了许多论述不够深入，全书各个部分整体性不够强的缺点。不过，瑕不掩瑜，还是很值得一看的。
1 有用 optman 2013-07-21 11:18:21
最喜欢的是Theory部分，讲信息熵，随机性，以及量子力学。
0 有用 冰凰 2015-05-17 17:05:26
科普读物啊，关于信息的方面讲的很广，深度不够是肯定的，这又不是论文。当然有些地方的原理的叙述不是很清晰，搞的偶心里痒痒的，真是遗憾大学没有碰见这本书~
0 有用 薛定谔的表妹 2020-04-19 13:52:45
上学是被老师强制种草后，读完之后似懂非懂，却又有点醍醐灌顶的书。Mark一下以后可深度再读
0 有用 目送飞鸿 2021-07-11 21:52:21
这本书的选题很有意思，作者博览群书，从引文和参考书目就可以看出。但写得实在是太啰嗦了，简洁真是一种美。比如像拜伦女儿的八卦，有必要展开吗？完全与主题无关，让人分心，典型的信息过载。作者科普能力比较强，但还是有一些概念没有解释清楚，比如量子计算机等。这点他不如John Gribbin。