Agent Palmer

I’ve never been an Apple person, so you can’t call me a MacHead. That doesn’t mean I don’t have respect for Steve Jobs, which is why I picked up his biography by Walter Isaacson. Jobs was an innovative thinker and one of the creative minds that has led technology to where it is now.

Jobs is arguably, along with Steve Wozniak, one of the paramount forefathers of personal computing, as well as the modern mobile age. I, like many others, was interested in how this all came to be – how he was able to see the future before it was here.

To succeed in many fields, it’s very important to have a base knowledge of the history within that field. Doctors learn about the history of medicine, writers learn the origins of the written word, and mechanics learn the basics behind the machines they’ll be working on.

However, it struck me as odd, that as a blogger and professional web guy, that I didn’t have more than the faintest idea of the history of the Internet, which is where I make a considerable portion of my income, professionally and otherwise.

Sometimes you don’t need 1,000 pages on a subject. Sometimes 200 will do. In the case of Ninja: The Shadow Warrior by Joel Levy which I recently picked up, this is definitely the case.

It is a complete, if not truncated, history of ninja and ninjutsu and reads more like a PBS one hour special on the subject. It covers the basics and either sates your appetite or wets it, leaving you hungry for more.