Ironically a lot of the works on Babbage go into his own trials and tribulations when trying to fundraise his Difference Engine and navigating the politics of 19th Century British Government affairs.

Jacquard's Web [1] was a good break from this tradition and goes into the technical foundations for Babbage's work - highlighting the loom industry in Lyons but primarily focusing on Babbage and Lovelace's technical efforts.

My two favorite quotes from this book:

  Babbage does not himself use the words 'programming' or
  'program'. These terms had not yet entered the language and 
  he is therefore obliged to resort to more obscure
  expressions. For example, he describes the Analytical 
  Engine as being made 'special' for the mathematical 
  formula in question. In precisely the same way, we could 
  visualize a Jacquard loom that was programmed to weave a 
  lily as being made 'special' for the task of lily-weaving.

And:

  Babbage also borrowed from the Jacquard loom the plan of 
  creating what he describes as a 'library' of cards that 
  carry out different functions, with the Analytical Engine's 
  operator being able to take cards from the library as 
  required and input them into the machine in order to make it 
  special for the task. The enormous advantage of the Jacquard 
  loom was, of course, precisely that it was able to weave any 
  picture or pattern for which a chain of cards had been made. 
  Weavers would keep these chains of cards in a storeroom 
  whose function was very much the same as that of the 
  library–or we might even say software library–which Babbage 
  was proposing to create.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Jacquards-Web-Hand-Loom-Birth-Informat...