D is for Digital

Location

What Well-Informed People Should Know About Computers

If you have a cell phone, you'll want to come hear Professor Brian Kernighan's presentation and ask him some questions.

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently hailed Kernighan's new book as essential reading for non-geeks. It's a primer for a lay audience, one which helps citizens to understand more about computing so that they can form more intelligent opinions about government policies on internet privacy and make wiser decisions about everything from what they share on social media to how they use their cell phones.

"I want my students -- and my readers -- to be intelligently skeptical about technology, and to be informed about the good and the not so good parts. The purpose of the book is to remove any vestige of magic [from technology], so readers will understand how such systems operate. How can pictures, music, and movies be sent around the world in no time at all? How does email work? How private is your email? Why is spam so easy to send and so hard to get rid of? Do cell phones really know where you are? How do iPhones and Android phones differ and why are they fundamentally the same? By the end of the book you should have a pretty decent idea of how computer and communications systems work and how they affect you."

Brian Kernighan is Professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. He is a contributor to the development of Unix and the co-author of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. He is co-author of The C Programming Language, the first book on C.