Gleick's "The Information" and Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral" would be 2 other good pop sci books on the origins of CS.

https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1...

https://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Uni...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbVbqRvqTM

This is a nice short video about her. And I read a bit more about her in this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/d...

To echo everyone; Hackers is a great book. Steven Levy books are both compelling reads and content rich. Crypto and In the plex both have their place as well. http://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field... I would also say "The Information" by James Gleick. It is a page turner with some neat concepts. Which is not so easy to do. http://www.amazon.ca/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/140...

The embedded short on Claude Shannon is very good and highly reccommended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq1-Iq9Vm28

A good book on the subject is Gleick's The Information http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/d...

Seconding Dream Machine. Three more:

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/d...

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe http://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Univ...

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Algorithms-That-Changed-Future/dp...

The Information A History, A Theory, A Flood. is the book that I wanted to write and then I found out it existed and the author did a better job than I probably could have.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/d...

Secrets of a JavaScript Ninja I enjoyed. Nothing that was like "ZOMG!" but it did help me think better about my JS code. http://www.manning.com/resig/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Tartt Has a new book out I haven't read, yet, but her other books have been great. especially http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-History-Donna-Tartt/dp/1400...

Then neither a tutorial nor book, but pretty helpful: Bookmarking the comments of people like Paul Graham. Since he usually makes insightful comments on interesting articles, it works as a sorta hackish "Best Of" link https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg