Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
- Length: 272 pages
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
- Publisher: Graywolf Press
- Publication Date: 2014-09-02
- ISBN-10: 1555976859
- ISBN-13: 9781555976859
- Sales Rank: #637732 (See Top 100 Books)
The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer coding
Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?
Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer’s art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Hello, World!
Chapter 2. Learning to Write
Chapter 3. The Language of Logic
Chapter 4. Histories and Mythologies
Chapter 5. The Code of Beauty: Anandavardhana
Chapter 6. The Beauty of Code
Chapter 7. The Code of Beauty: Abhinavagupta
Chapter 8. Mythologies and Histories
Chapter 9. The Language of Literature
Chapter 10. Application.Restart()