Mr Viral
Skip to main content
25 Great Tech Books to Gift (or Keep for Yourself)Give the techie in your life access to the inner workings of the companies and characters shaping Big Tech.
Featured in this articleChip Chase
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
Read more
The Early Days of the Computer
The Soul of a New Machine
Read more
Evil Twin
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Read more
An Icon
Steve Jobs
Read more
It is tough to overestimate Big Tech’s influence on the modern world, but how did we get here? The best tech books unravel the rise and, occasionally, fall of some of the dominant companies and characters that created the gadgets and software we spend so much of our lives using.
You’ll find intensely detailed biographies, in-depth company histories, and plenty of drama and enlightenment in these tech tomes, and they also make great gifts for the techy folks in your life. You may also be interested in our Gifts for Book Lovers, Best Cookbooks, and Best Kindles guides.
Updated November 2025: We’ve added five new books, including The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip, Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World, and No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram.
Evil Twin
Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
This fascinating dive down the rabbit hole of Covid conspiracy is ostensibly about how people confuse Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf. Klein is a leftist journalist and climate activist; Wolf was a third-wave feminist but is now a rabid anti-vaxxer.
If you’re still puzzled over the convergence of wellness and the far-right or wondering why so many ordinary folks are swallowing the kind of misinformation that breeds racism and climate denialism, Klein has some convincing answers. This is challenging and sometimes bleak reading, but it was also the most important book of 2023. It’s brutally honest, calling out the absurdities of capitalism and the role social media has played in the rise of narcissism.
An Icon
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Released just 19 days after the death of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, this astonishing biography takes a deep dive into his life and goes some way toward explaining his enduring legacy. Isaacson was picked by Jobs himself, who granted more than 40 interviews to his biographer and reportedly exerted no control over the final edit. Jobs’ intense passion and ambition saw him successfully marry creative ideas with technological innovations and sell them to the general public. This is an accessible book that never gets too technical. It insightfully charts the rise of Apple and Pixar and the development of the Mac, iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPad. While it is flattering at times, Jobs’ ruthlessness is not sugar-coated, and anyone with more than a passing interest in the man must read this book.
For a less Jobs-centric exploration of the Mac’s development, read Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, by Andy Hertzfeld.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings