Perspective

The author, Tracey Kidder is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and the author of many books, among them Home Town and Mountains Beyond Mountains. As such, he is a good researcher and did the research that he needed to do in order to write The Soul of a New Machine, the book that earned him the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 1982. The Harvard graduate also attended the University of Iowa and served in Viet Nam. Born in New York, he now resides in Massachusetts and Maine.

Kidder writes in an objective tone and is very good a telling the story and in explaining the technology. The reader does not feel overwhelmed by the technological facts presented in the book and is able to learn not only how computers function but also how they are designed and built. Kidder does a good job showing how the pros...