Best books for IT pros 2017: 10 books all IT professionals should read

The Road Ahead written by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson cuts straight to the heart of the personal computing revolution, which at the time was just starting to gather immense speed.

First released in 1995, The Road Ahead is still very much relevant today, depicting a 'global information superhighway', in which the internet is bursting at the seams with information which impacts our lives daily from the first personal computers.

The predictions that Gates makes in the book have largely come true, for example, regarding the music industry: "Record companies, or even individual recording artists, might choose to sell music a new way. The music will be stored as bits of information on a server on the highway."

Coming from well-established careers within Silicon Valley, both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg had a challenge on their hands when they joined Google in its infancy.

Schmidt and Rosenberg had to relearn what they knew about IT business management and help Google grow from a small startup to what we know today and How Google Works shares just how they did that.

In this book, the authors explain how big milestones such as the internet, the mobile revolution and of course the cloud meant that they had to move their focus from companies to the consumer.

How Google Works offers great insight into Google's growth, how it has innovated and become one of the world's biggest global icons.

Packed full of anecdotes and spirited metaphors, The Age of Cryptocurrency explains the digital currency landscape and how the current system governing money with its middlemen and "coined liberty" was first disrupted in 2008 with the introduction of Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrencies could cut out the unnecessary brokers and the elite gatekeepers and instead provide a way to transform the way we perceive and use money, creating a totally digital and democratic monetary system.

The Age of Cryptocurrency offers a complete guide to Bitcoin, its pros and cons, its origins and how a cybereconomy could work.

The Intel Trinity tells the story of Intel's co-founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove, Intel's third employee who later ran the company through much of its growth period.

Author Michael S. Malone sifts through Intel's archives, providing a detailed and encapsulating company history surrounding each of the men, highlighting not only their influence and hard work but also their personalities and challenges along the way.

The Intel Trinity is a great base for getting to know the three visionaries, legendary in Silicon Valley.

To give it its full name 'iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It', offers an insight into Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak's life, career and the Apple computer.

The book also sheds light on his relationship with Steve Jobs and his feelings towards Apple as a whole.

The book concludes with Wozniak offering advice to aspiring programmers and young people to pursue their own inventions and prioritise their passions over the mainstream.

In this humorous book, Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds and Just For Fun co-author David Diamond provide a history of the Linux operating system and highlights the principles found in Law of Linus, named in honour of Linus Torvalds.

Just For Fun also tells the story of Torvald's early life, his passion for programming and his belief in open source software and the free software movement.

The life of the high-powered tech elite working in Silicon Valley is something that can intrigue, baffle and infuriate a lot of people outside of it and Chaos Monkeys offers a guide for navigation, stripping back the facade and revealing its dark side.

Former Facebook and Twitter advisor Antonio García Martínez tells of his time in the Californian tech bubble and looks at how tech can and should disrupt all if not every part of modern life.

In this fast-paced book, García explains how to succeed in the digital sector, from startups and digital marketing to social media and digital privacy, helping us understand the wealthy and insular world within Silicon Valley.

In this bestseller, Michael Lewis tells the infamous tale of the multi-millionaire high-frequency traders (HFT) working in the US finance market on Wall Street and the programmers that scammed the banking system.

Centering on former Goldman Sachs programmer, Sergey Aleynikov and founder of IEX, the Investors' Exchange, Bradley Katsuyama, the book describes how electronic trading replaced countless jobs and changed the way the whole market was run.

Lewis then details Aleynikov's conviction for stealing Goldman Sachs' high-frequency trading source code before joining a rival firm.

Written by Walter Isaacson at the request of Jobs, Steve Jobs takes an honest look at Jobs' life, and is based on countless interviews conducted by Isaacson over a two-year period. Isaacson pulled information from Jobs' friends, family, colleagues and even rivals.

The book, released in 2011, 19 days after Jobs' death, describes life all the way from childhood and school to his milestone moments at Apple and his relationship with Bill Gates.

A film adaptation of the book was released in 2015.

Author George Dyson draws attention to the small but dedicated group of mathematicians and programmers that were tasked with creating the modern-day __computer after the second world war.

Asked to meet at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and led by John von Neumann the group was set on making Alan Turing's 'universal machine' a reality. In fact, they successfully formulated the numerical framework that supports most if not all modern computers.