James Gleick's "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood"

This is a monster of a book. It is a vast landscape in which there are sections of pure delight and others where the writer appears to have gone a bit too far and ended up beached and lost. The bits about "information flood" and especially the many occasions on which Gleick turns to Jorge Luis Borges’s story "The Library of Babel" is a bit much for my taste. I found nothing useful on the musings about infinite random texts or the historial worries about "too much information". On the whole, however, the book is well worth reading.

For me, the meat-and-potatoes of this book are the sections on logic, cryptology, information theory, and quantum information. The other historical bits of fun to read but distracting. The real value in this book is that it offers a nice historical review of the rise of understanding about symbol manipulation and the mathematics of "information". The vignettes about key historical figures adds an excellent layer to the technical account.

The good news is that this book is accessible to anyone with a modest technical background. It doesn't try to teach you theories or delve into the mathematics, but it gives you a good appreciation of this technical side of things. The weaving of a story through several technical displines and their key personalities gives you good insight into how the "science of information" has developed and its trajectory into the future via the great 20th century physicist John Archibald Wheeler's maxim of "it from bit".

An excellent review of this book by Freeman Dyson can be found here as well as links to subsidiary information about Gleick.

Update 2011aug22: A less useful review is available via the NY Times Sunday Book Review from Geoffrey Nunberg:

Gleick ranges over the scientific landscape in a looping itinerary that takes the reader from Maxwell’s demon to Godel’s theorem, from black holes to selfish genes. Some of the concepts are challenging, but as in previous books like “Chaos” and “Genius,” his biography of Richard Feynman, Gleick provides lucid expositions for readers who are up to following the science and suggestive analogies for those who are just reading for the plot. And there are anecdotes that every reader can enjoy: Shannon building a machine called Throbac I that did arithmetic with Roman numerals; the Victorian polymath Charles Babbage writing to Tennyson to take exception to the arithmetic in “Every minute dies a man / Every minute one is born.”

Nunberg provides a literate review but not a particularly insightful.

Compare the above to Freeman Dyson's succinct summary:

According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live. The flood began quietly. The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.

Nunberg is for artistic dilettantes, Dyson is for the scientific types.