Many books have been written about Silicon Valley and the collection of geniuses, eccentrics, and mavericks who launched the "Digital Revolution"; Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires and Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning are just two excellent accounts of the unprecedented explosion of tech entrepreneurs and their game-changing success.

But Walter Isaacson goes them one better: The Innovators, his follow-up to the massive (in both sales and size) Steve Jobs, is probably the widest-ranging and most comprehensive narrative of them all. Don't let the scope or page-count deter you: while Isaacson builds the story from the 19th century—innovator by innovator, just as the players themselves stood atop the achievements of their predecessors—his discipline and era-based structure allows readers to dip in and out of digital history, from Charles Babbage's Difference Engine to Alan Turing.

Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Jan Tschichold, book designer, "methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied."