Matthew Ball is the founder and CEO of Epyllion, as well as the former global head of strategy at Amazon Studios. He has written for publications such as the New York Times, the Economist, and Bloomberg. His self-published Metaverse essays have been read millions of times and cited by executives from Epic Games, Facebook, Tencent, and Coinbase. He is the author of The Metaverse, one of the best books on technology.

The term "Metaverse" has suddenly appeared everywhere, from the front pages of national newspapers to the latest fashion trends to the plans of the world's most powerful corporations. It is already influencing the policies of the United States government, the European Union, and the Chinese Communist Party.

But, exactly, what is the Metaverse? According to Matthew Ball, a pioneering theorist and venture capitalist, a persistent and interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds will eventually serve as the gateway to most online experiences, as well as underpin much of the physical world. For decades, these concepts were confined to science fiction and video games, but they are now poised to revolutionize every industry and function, from finance and healthcare to education, consumer goods, city planning, dating, and much more.

Taking us on a tour of the "next internet," Ball demonstrates that many proto-Metaverses, such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox, are already here. However, these are only a preview of what is to come. Ball provides a thorough definition of the Metaverse before delving into the technologies that will power it and the breakthroughs required to fully realize it. He addresses the Metaverse's governance challenges, investigates the role of Web3, blockchains, and NFTs, and forecasts Metaverse winners and losers. Most importantly, he investigates many of the Metaverse's nearly limitless applications.

The internet will no longer be at arm's length; rather, it will surround us, with much of our lives, labor, and leisure occurring within the Metaverse. Ball envisions trillions of dollars in new value and a radical reshaping of society, bringing clarity and authority to a frequently misunderstood concept.

Author: Matthew Ball

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Metaverse-How-Will-Revolutionize-Everything/dp/1324092033/

Ratings: 4.4 out of 5 stars (from 624 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #12,185 in Books

#11 in Social Aspects of Technology

#11 in Digital Currencies

#61 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)

From September 1973 to January 1977, Henry A. Kissinger was the 56th Secretary of State. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1977, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1986, the Medal of Liberty.

Eric Schmidt is a successful entrepreneur, technologist, and philanthropist. As Google's CEO, he led the company's transformation from a Silicon Valley startup to a global technology leader.

The inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is Daniel Huttenlocher. Previously, he was the founding Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech, Cornell University's digital technology-focused graduate school in New York City.

Three of the world's most accomplished and deep thinkers join forces to investigate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is transforming human society—as well as what this technology means for us all.

An AI learned to win chess by making moves that human grand masters would never have thought of. Another AI discovered a new antibiotic by analyzing molecular properties unknown to human scientists. In simulated dogfights, AI-powered jets are now defeating experienced human pilots. AI is making its way into search, streaming, medicine, education, and a variety of other fields, transforming how humans perceive reality.

Three leading thinkers have collaborated on The Age of AI to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is a critical roadmap to our present and future, an era unlike any other. It is regarded as one of the best books on technology.

Author: Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Age-I-Our-Human-Future/dp/0316273805/

Ratings: 4.2 out of 5 stars (from 946 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #4,340 in Books

#1 in Politics of Privacy & Surveillance

#1 in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics

#3 in Social Aspects of Technology

Darrell Rigby is a partner in Bain & Company's Boston office, where he leads the Global Innovation practice. He has appeared on CNBC, CNN's Moneyline, and Bloomberg as a frequent speaker and writer on innovation, agile, and retail. His work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Financial Times, and other journals. Sarah Elk is the global head of the firm's Operating Model practice and a partner in Bain's Chicago office. Steve Berez is a founding member of Bain's Enterprise Technology practice and a partner in the firm's Boston office.

For decades, business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge gap: they aspire to build agile, adaptable organizations. Their daily reality, however, is one of silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Agile is now hailed as the necessary bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the front of the pack.

Not so quickly. Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check in this clear-eyed, indispensable book. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence, such as the notion that it can completely reshape an organization, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They demonstrate that agile teams can be extremely effective at improving people's jobs and accelerating innovation, but only if the method is fully understood and implemented correctly.

Balance, they argue, is the key. Every organization must optimize and tight control some of its operations while also innovating. When done correctly, agile allows for rapid innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and dependability required for traditional operations. The authors explain how agile actually works, what not to do, and the critical importance of properly scaling agile in order to reap its full benefits. They then lay out a strategy for guiding the enterprise's transition to a truly agile state.

Agile is not an end in itself; rather, it is a means to an end of becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-read for any company attempting to make the transition—or maintain high agility.

Author: Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk and Steve Berez

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Agile-Right-Transformation-Without/dp/163369870X/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 621 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #30,895 in Books

#24 in Business Project Management (Books)

#393 in Business Management (Books)

#578 in Leadership & Motivation

Tracy Kidder attended the University of Iowa after graduating from Harvard. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Robert F. Kennedy Award, and numerous other literary honors. Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine and is the author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine.

Tracy Kidder's "riveting" (Washington Post) account of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it has since become required reading for anyone interested in the history of the American technology industry.

Since 1981, when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution, computers have evolved. What hasn't changed is the high-tech industry's frenetic pace, the go-for-broke business approach that has led to so many computer companies winning big (or going bankrupt), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations.

The Soul of a New Machine is an important chapter in the history of the machine that changed the world in the twentieth century. The book is among the best books on technology.

Author: Tracy Kidder

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 697 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #25,561 in Books

#3 in Computing Industry History

#43 in Computers & Technology Industry

#65 in Company Business Profiles (Books)

Janelle Shane holds a PhD in electrical engineering as well as a master's degree in physics. She blogs about artificial intelligence and the hilarious and sometimes unsettling ways that algorithms get human things wrong at aiweirdness.com. She has appeared on the TED main stage, as well as in the New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, PopularScience, All Things Considered, Science Friday, Marketplace, and other publications. She has been named a Fast Company 100 Most Creative Person in Business and an Adweek Young Influential.

You look like a thing, and I love you, according to an artificial intelligence trained by scientist Janelle Shane, creator of the popular blog AI Weirdness, is one of the best pickup lines ever. She creates amusing AIs that learn how to name paint colors, cook the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans—all in the name of better understanding the technology that governs so much of our daily lives.

Every day, we rely on AI for recommendations, translations, and adding cat ears to our selfie videos. We also trust AI with life and death decisions on the road and in our hospitals. But just how intelligent is AI, and how does it solve problems, understand humans, and even drive self-driving cars?

Shane provides answers to every AI question you've ever asked, as well as some you haven't. For example, how can a computer create the ideal sandwich? What does Harry Potter fan fiction generated by a robot look like? Is "Vampire Hog Bride" really the best Halloween costume in the world?

Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt—and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity—in this smart, often hilarious introduction to the most fascinating science of our time.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is an excellent book for anyone interested in what the robots in our lives are thinking.

Author: Janelle Shane

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316525243/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 627 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #132,916 in Books

#36 in Science & Scientists Humor

#127 in Social Aspects of Technology

#173 in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics

Hadley Wickham is a Rice University Assistant Professor and the Dobelman Family Junior Chair in Statistics. He is an active member of the R community, having written and contributed to over 30 R packages. He was awarded the John Chambers Award for Statistical Computing for his work developing data reshaping and visualization tools.

Garrett Grolemund is a R developer, statistician, and teacher who currently works for RStudio. Data analysis, he believes, is a largely untapped source of value for both industry and science. Garrett earned his Ph.D. in Hadley Wickham's lab at Rice University, where his research traced the origins of data analysis as a cognitive process and identified how attentional and epistemological concerns guide all data analysis.

Learn how to use R to transform raw data into insight, knowledge, and comprehension. R for Data Science, one of the best books on technology, will introduce you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages that work together to make data science fast, fluent, and enjoyable. R for Data Science is intended for readers with no prior programming experience and is intended to get you started with data science as soon as possible.

Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund walk you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, modeling, and communicating the results of your data. You'll get a comprehensive, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, as well as the fundamental tools you'll need to manage the details. Each section of the book is accompanied by exercises to help you put what you've learned into practice.

You'll discover how to:

• Wrangle - transform your datasets into an analysis-friendly format.
• Learn to use powerful R tools to solve data problems with greater clarity and ease.
• Examine your data, generate hypotheses, and test them quickly.
• Model - create a low-dimensional summary of your dataset's true "signals."
• Communicate - learn R Markdown to integrate prose, code, and results.

Author: Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1491910399/

Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars (from 128 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #19,552 in Books

#2 in Mathematical & Statistical Software

#6 in Data Processing

#23 in Probability & Statistics (Books)

Hal Abelson is a member of the IEEE and the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He founded Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Free Software Foundation. He is also a co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology. Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering Gerald Jay Sussman teaches at MIT.

Over the last decade, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has had a significant impact on computer science curricula. This long-awaited revision includes changes to the entire text. Most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, have new implementations, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published. A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the importance of various approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming with lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order graphics procedures and stream processing applications in numerical programming, as well as many new exercises. Furthermore, all of the programs have been rewritten to run in any IEEE-compliant Scheme implementation.

Author: Julie Sussman, Gerald Jay Sussman and Harold Abelson

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262510871/

Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars (from 595 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #29,818 in Books

#13 in Computer Programming Languages

#48 in Software Development (Books)

#60 in Computer Software (Books)

Steven Skiena is a computer science professor at Stony Brook University. His research interests include the development and application of graph, string, and geometric algorithms (particularly to biology). He is the author of four books, including "The Algorithm Design Manual" and "Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win". He received the ONR Young Investigator Award as well as the IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award.

The "mystery" of designing algorithms and analyzing their efficacy and efficiency is removed in this newly expanded and updated second edition of the best-selling classic. Expanding on the first edition, the book is now the primary textbook of choice for algorithm design courses, as well as the premier practical reference guide to algorithms for programmers, researchers, and students.

The Algorithm Design Manual is a reader-friendly guide to combinatorial algorithm technology that emphasizes design over analysis. The first section, Techniques, provides simple instructions on how to design and analyze computer algorithms. The second section, Resources, is intended for browsing and reference, and includes a catalog of algorithmic resources, implementations, and a large bibliography.

Author: Steven S S. Skiena

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1849967202/

Ratings: 4.4 out of 5 stars (from 544 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #155,474 in Books

#13 in Discrete Mathematics (Books)

#102 in Data Processing

#240 in Software Development (Books)

Paul Leinwand is a strategy, growth, and capability building adviser and thought leader for Strategy&, PwC's global strategy consulting business, and has guided executive teams across multiple industries for over two decades. He also teaches strategy as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Mahadeva Matt Mani works for Strategy& as an adviser to executives across industries on business model transformation and operational performance improvement. Over the past 25 years, he has led PwC's transformation platform and worked with dozens of companies around the world on their transformation efforts.

Transformation to digital is critical. However, winning in today's world necessitates more than just digitization. It is necessary to recognize that the nature of competitive advantage has shifted—and that being digital is no longer sufficient.

Beyond Digital takes readers inside twelve companies and how they have navigated this monumental shift: from Philips' reinvention from a broad conglomerate to a focused health technology player, to Cleveland Clinic's engagement with its broader ecosystem to improve and expand its leading patient care to more locations around the world, to Microsoft's overhaul of its global strategy. Adobe, Citigroup, Eli Lilly, Hitachi, Honeywell, Inditex, Komatsu, STC Pay, and Titan are among the other case studies.

The authors identify the seven imperatives that leaders must follow as the digital age evolves, based on a significant new body of research:

• Rethink your company's role in the world.
• Accept and create value through ecosystems
• Create a system of exclusive insights with your customers.
• Make your organization result-oriented.
• Invert your leadership team's focus.
• Reimagine your people's social contract.
• Disrupt your own leadership style.

These seven imperatives form a playbook for leaders on how to define a bolder purpose and transform their organizations.

Author: Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Digital-Leaders-Transform-Organizations/dp/1647822327/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 84 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #404,161 in Books

#630 in Strategic Business Planning

#1,050 in Systems & Planning

#4,640 in Leadership & Motivation

Susanne Tedrick currently works for a Fortune 500 technology company as a cloud infrastructure specialist. Susanne is fiercely committed to increasing the participation of women and people of color in STEM professional opportunities, and she volunteers for several non-profits, including CompTIA, where she serves as Chair of the Advancing Tech Talent and Diversity Executive Council, and NPower, where she is a coalition member for the Command Shift initiative.

Among the best books on technology, Women of Color in Technology: A Roadmap for Inspiring and Mentoring the Next Generation Innovators aims to assist women of color in overcoming the barriers that prevent them from pursuing and sustaining careers in technology. Contrary to popular belief, tech careers are diverse and enjoyable, and they extend far beyond coding. This book will show you how today's tech careers are extremely dynamic, and you'll learn how your soft skills, such as communication, public speaking, and networking, can help you succeed in tech.

This book will walk readers through the process of cultivating strong relationships and developing a network that will get them to where they want to go. Readers will learn how to identify a strong, knowledgeable support network on which to rely for advice or mentoring. This step is critical in attracting and retaining young women of color in STEM fields.

• Create a professional network to get the help you require.
• Find a mentor who understands your personal goals and challenges.
• Overcome negativity and stay motivated during challenging times.
• Identify and develop the hard and soft skills required to advance in technology.

Read this book to help bring your vision of a tech future to life. You'll develop the right tools and mindset with practical advice and inspiring stories. Women of Color in Tech will show you how to find the resources you need to succeed, whether you're just starting out in tech or want to advance your current career.

Author: Susanne Tedrick

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Women-Color-Tech-Generation-Technology/dp/1119633486/

Ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars (from 41 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #363,678 in Books

#319 in Computers & Technology Industry

#585 in Women & Business (Books)

#1,533 in Job Hunting & Career Guides