1. Steve Jobs

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

2. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, veteran technology journalist Ashlee Vance provides the first inside look into the extraordinary life and times of Silicon Valley’s most audacious entrepreneur. Written with exclusive access to Musk, his family and friends, the book traces the entrepreneur’s journey from a rough upbringing in South Africa to the pinnacle of the global business world. Vance spent more than 30 hours in conversation with Musk and interviewed close to 300 people to tell the tumultuous stories of Musk’s world-changing companies: PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, and to characterize a man who has renewed American industry and sparked new levels of innovation while making plenty of enemies along the way.

3. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It’s Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO.

The company’s new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced.

4. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a “riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving” (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the computer and the Internet.

5. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

For twenty-five years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession–until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. “I think they just want to hire younger people,” his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of “marketing fellow.” What could go wrong?

6. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

With a new foreword by Marc Andreessen and new afterword by the authors, Becoming Steve Jobs is a narrative on Jobs’ evolution as a manager and leader, as an astute CEO, as a father, and as a visionary with an unparalled sense of what consumers wanted—before they knew what they wanted themselves. But he didn’t start out with those skills. When he first left Apple in 1985 and struck out to form his own company, NeXT, he knew little about running a company, holding to a budget, or developing successful products. It was during his years in the wilderness, unsuccessfully launching NeXT and helping to revitalize Pixar, that he learned the skills that would make him so successful upon his return to Apple in 1996.

7. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.

8. How Google Works

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary–and frequently contrarian–principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

9. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

Before slim laptops that fit into briefcases, computers looked like strange, alien vending machines. But in “the most staggering burst of technical invention by a single person in high-tech history” (BusinessWeek) Steve Wozniak invented the first true personal computer. Wozniak teamed up with Steve Jobs, and Apple Computer was born, igniting the computer revolution and transforming the world. In iWoz the mischievous genius with the low profile treats readers to a rollicking, no-holds-barred account of his life―for once, in the voice of the wizard himself.

10. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

It seems like “big data” is in the news every day, as we read the latest examples of how powerful algorithms are teasing out the hidden connections between seemingly unrelated things. Whether it is used by the NSA to fight terrorism or by online retailers to predict customers’ buying patterns, big data is a revolution occurring around us, in the process of forever changing economics, science, culture, and the very way we think. But it also poses new threats, from the end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior. What we have already seen is just the tip of the iceberg.