This series is very up and down. Some of the books are brilliant (Philosophy, Physics, Maths), some have got lots of good bits (Economics) and some have the occasional nugget of gold within considerable yawn (Literature). This is in the third category.
Bizarrely, Chatfield tackles each of the issues in terms of their history which, in the context of the internet, dates back to the old pre-web days of the 1980s. Sometimes he goes back all the way to the birth of computing. I suppose this was a good tactic because I knew less about this than anything else. Where I had some knowledge of a topic his necessarily shallow approach added very little to what I knew so I had little new to think about.
Disappointing. Useful for reference.
February 2012; 203 pages
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