Bookworm Blurbs

Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers.

Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters -- the Googleplex -- to show how Google works. (source)

I had to read this book for my Understanding Information course. I'm not a huge fan of this class because the professors are HORRIBLY unorganized and don't communicate well with each other, and they still haven't laid out what we're supposed to be learning from the course - which ends in about a month. So this class has been the cause of a great deal of stress for me. But I surprisingly actually was very interested in this book. 

In the Plex is sort of like the authorized biography of Google. I think that most, if not all, of us would agree that Google has been an immensely successful company. They've achieved some seriously amazing feats. But they're also super secretive and, prior to the publication of this book, very little was known about the company itself - and that's still true to some degree. It's important to keep in mind while reading this that this book was written with Google's approval -- which means that Levy is most definitely "pro-Google" and none of Google's Deep Dark Secrets (if any exist) are exposed in this book. None the less, this book was super cool and really opened my eyes to just how much Google has accomplished. 

This review has been very brief, but I don't really have too much more to say about it. It's not a particularly tough read, even if you're like me and you're not very technologically savvy. Although this book definitely is biased, it highlights how innovative and unique Google is and explains, to some degree, why they've been so successful. If you have any interest in business or the Internet, definitely pick this up!