Ed Note: one of Boingboing's three current guest bloggers, Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America. (You can see a video interview introducing the book here.) He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

In part because my books have had a habit of weaving multiple disciplines together, and in part because I've written quite a bit about technology, I'm often asked about the tools I use to research and write my books. Given that Boingboing has its own wonderful multi-disciplinary sensibility, and of course a major obsession with DIY movements, I thought it might be fun to say a few words about the writing system I've developed over the past few books.

About the Information Diet
Healthy information consumption habits are about more than productivity and efficiency. They're about your personal health, and the health of society. Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to new forms of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential in today's information age.
With this book, you’ll learn:
The relationship between power, authority, and information since the dawn of the first major information-technology boom
How people react to information consumption, according to cognitive science and neuroscience findings
How the new, information-abundant society is suffering consequences from poor information consumption habits
What constitutes a healthy information diet and how you can get started

What is enough?
Enough is a very personal metric. Like our center of gravity, each of us must find what is enough by swaying from less to more until a comfortable medium is found.
The goal, then, is not to find what is, or will be, enough forever. That is impossible. The goal is to discover the tools and strategies you need to find what is enough for you right now and provide the flexibility to adjust as the conditions change.
The series of essays in this book explore many of the ideas and strategies needed to meet this goal.

FIND A FRIEND IN CODE.

This book tells a story. It’s a story of liberation, of taking the first steps towards understanding the foundations of computing, writing your own code, and creating your own media without the bonds of existing software tools. This story is not reserved for computer scientists and engineers. This story is for you.

Here at 99%, we have a serious penchant for books that really dig into the nitty gritty of the creative process, productivity strategies, and/or the future of technology. Now, with our tastes fully disclosed, here's a highly subjective list of our favorite new(ish) nonfiction titles that would make great gifts for the brainiac in your life.

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

This document is a step-by-step guide for Cucumber, a tool that is quickly becoming the weapon of choice for many agile teams when it comes to functional test automation, creating executable specifications and building a living documentation.

Tinderbox is a tool for notes, a personal content assistant. The Tinderbox Way takes a close look at Tinderbox and its underlying ideas, exploring not just the program's mechanics but also its design and its spirit.

From the elements of writing more effective notes to the frontiers of information farming, from the classroom and conference hall to the research laboratory, The Tinderbox Way explores a new approach to working with and representing interlinked ideas.

From Chapter One:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

Tinderbox is personal in another sense, as well; unlike most corporate software today, Tinderbox was designed and implemented by a person not by a committee, a corporation, or a focus group. That person is me: Mark Bernstein. I designed Tinderbox, and wrote just about every line of the tens of thousands of lines that make Tinderbox run. Tinderbox is the product of an individual vision. It wasnt written to meet requirements or specs or to adhere to business rules. Along the way, there have been thousands of decisions engineering decisions, artistic decisions, operational decisions. In the end, I made the choices.

Life, living, can be complex. There's work, family, and that big bucket of everything else. Hectic doesn't come close to defining the pace of modern life. And yet within this whirlwind it's often the simple things that bring us the greatest joy — if we could only find them in the clutter of our lives. It may not be necessary to give it all up and live in a cave, but it can sometimes seem like a good idea.

Apprenticeship Patterns
Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman

"Even if this book targets a mostly technical audience I would recommend it every passionated person who is interested in envolving the own skills and patterns. It provides a goog guidance for the art of continuos self improvement and assessment with a balanced focus on technical/personal motivation and retrospective techniques/patterns." - IT-Stammtisch Darmstadt, März 2010 "Ein Buch, das zum Lesen abseits von Monitor und Tastatur gedacht ist. Es dient der Reflexion, dem Betrachten der Programmierarbeit aus der Vogelperspektive und mag manchem über Motivationsprobleme hinweg helfen." - linux-magazin.de, September 2010 Lesen Sie die ausführliche Rezension unter: http://www.linux-magazin.de/Fachbuecher/Stammbuch-des-strebsamen-Programmierers

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and the author of the new book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” changed the way people think about thinking by asking them questions. They weren’t trick questions, either. Instead, Kahneman relied almost exclusively on straightforward surveys, in which he described various scenarios. Here’s a sample:

Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields—including economics, medicine, and politics—but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.

A book by Nathan Yau who writes for FlowingData, Visualize This is a practical guide on visualization and how to approach real-world data. The book is published by Wiley and is available on Amazon and other major online booksellers.

Git is an extremely powerful source control system. Its power lies in its speed and flexibility, but this can also be a point of confusion for many new users. Git is unfortunately quite inconsistent in its syntax, and exposes many of its not-so-friendly internals to the outside world, sometimes to the detriment of usability.

As many systems built by hardcore engineers (Git came from Linux kernel hackers), if wielded by a wizard, it can be used to achieve many great things, but can be initially confusing even for seasoned developers. This book bypasses the ugly internals of git and gets to the heart of improving your development workflows by using git.

n the last ten years the Ruby programming language has gone from an obscure open source project to the expansive technology behind some of the world’s most visible web properties. In this article Russ Olsen points out some of the Ruby ‘must reads’, web sites and books that will help the new Ruby programmer get started.

This is the website for the Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and published by Apress. Here you can find the full content of the book, a blog with tips and updates about Git and the book and open source projects related to Git or referenced in the book. Read the book now!

Die besten Einführungsbücher

Technical Blogging is the first book to specifically teach programmers, technical people, and technically-oriented entrepreneurs how to become successful bloggers. There is no magic to successful blogging; with this book you’ll learn the techniques to attract and keep a large audience of loyal, regular readers and leverage this popularity to achieve your goals.

Von modernen IT-Diensten wird erwartet, dass sie ohne wahrnehmbare Ausfallzeit kontinuierlich zur Verfügung stehen. Wie Sysadmins dies mit Hilfe der intelligenten Clustersoftware Linux-HA in Version 3 erreichen können, zeigt Michael Schwartzkopff in diesem kompakten Handbuch. Er beleuchtet, was Hochverfügbarkeit eigentlich bedeutet, führt in die Grundlagen von Clustern ein und erklärt dann die Arbeitsweise von Linux-HA. Nach der Installation geht es um die Einrichtung und Verwaltung der Ressourcen. Neben den Tipps und Tricks zu Planung und Betrieb werden Sysadmins vor allem von den Erläuterungen typischer Szenarien wie einer hochverfügbaren Firewall und einem zentralen Fileserver, der Plattenplatz mittels iSCSI vergibt, profitieren. In dieser durchgehend aktualisierten zweiten Auflage wird die Konfiguration mithilfe von heartbeat, pacemaker und OpenAIS vorgestellt.