These "true tales" cutting across the classes in Silicon Valley are fascinating. Bronson is a gifted story teller. Yes, you gain insight about how software is sold. Yes, this is a world gone, at least for the time being, the way of the Internet bubble. Should the book be retitled "Gone With the Wind?"

Komisar is a bit full of himself. Still, he and his co-author Kent Lineback provide some interesting insights regarding "the business" in this Harvard Business School Press book. Among them: don't postpone doing what you want to do for some hypothetical payoff, and the rule that any deal takes far longer to close than you think it will -- even taking the rule into account.

Extreme Programming, or XP, according to this book is a software development methodology that "embraces change." In fact, XP, as described here, falls far short of being a full-fledged methodology. There are some good ideas here, which may energize some software development teams. But bear in mind that XP is not for every software developer (or every programming manager), and the solutions suggested are surely not a panacea (some are common sense, and others are dubious).

The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing is an intellectual pre-history of the computer. Just as Edmund Wilson's classic To the Finland Station explains the philosophy of ideas that led up to the Russian revolution, ending at the beginning of the actual revolution, this book highlights the ideas of philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians that pre-dated the actual computer. You won't find much about the vaccuum tube, electrical engineering, Univac side of the history of computers here (although Davis, a logician, computer scientist, and historian of mathematics is knowledgable about this material as well). Instead, you'll find a gripping saga of the people and ideas that formulated the conceptual, software side of the logical engines that came to be known as the modern computer. Plenty of brain teasers for Geeks here, but for those who are more interested in human beings than intellectual puzzles, interesting profiles of great thinkers such as Leibniz, Boole, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert, Godel, and Turing. Full disclosure: Davis is the father of Julian Capital Managing Director Harold Davis and Julian Davis's grandfather.

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos is a book about the science of complexity, which is "a subject still so new...that nobody knows how to define it." OK, systems -- the stock market, weather, galaxies, whatever -- are complex and it's hard to figure out organizing principles. Maybe the correct approach is to look for what author Waldrop, a writer for Science magazine, terms "spontaneous self-organization." The search for adaptive rules that cause complex systems to spontaneously self-organize and live at a balance point ("the edge of chaos") probably makes more sense as an aid to understanding than the "nobody knows why" approach. But, at least as presented in this book, it falls short of defining a new "science" of complexity.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired Magazine, is an attempt to describe a new "biology" -- "the marriage of the born and the made." Essentially, the premise is that the future is technological, but it will not be mechanical. In other words, we are headed towards a future of "neo-biological civilization." In a world in which the sequence for the human genome is published on the Web, this is probably a truism. But Kelly's recipe for coping with this, dubbed the "Nine Laws of God" may not be that helpful. (Sample laws: "Control from the bottom up" and "Change changes itself.")

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love is non-fiction that is a better read than most novels. Author Sobel's page-turner offers insights on scientific methodology, seventeenth century civilization (or lack thereof), the nature of ignorance, and -- all too often -- the idiocy of conventional thinking.

This guy may be a wacko -- in fact, as much of a wacko as any of his characters -- but he knows a lot about writing. In this short, elegant cross between a "how-to" and a memoir, he tells it like it is.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain is George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London meets fin de siecle yuppie restaurant-itis. The book is hilarious. If you read it, you will learn probably more than you ever wanted about the operation of commercial kitchens. You'll also learn some good things to avoid. If a restaurant has dirty public bathrooms, don't eat there. (It's easier to keep a bathroom clean than a kitchen.) Discount sushi is a no-no (ranks right up there with cut-rate brain surgery as a dubious concept). Don't order fresh seafood -- particularly the "special of the day" -- on a Monday. (Due to industry buying patterns, it is probably four to five days old.) OK, how about this one? The reuse of bread, e.g., recycling the unused contents of bread baskets, is an industry-wide practice. I could go on and on -- but better you should read the book. Oh, and one more thing. Leading a cooking crew, with its heirarchic structure that includes elements of a piratical crew, its combination of order and chaos, is much like leading a team of software developers.