[Book Review] Steve Jobs--The Exclusive Biography by Walter Issacson

Rating: 3/5

Genre: Non-Fiction, Biography

Book Review:

       The reasons I like biography is that it is inspring. I’d like to know more about someone I admire, and Steve Jobs was one of them. I started  out knowing next to nothing about Steve Jobs (although I own an iPod nano and a Mac book pro). I was kind of curious about the people behind it. From this book, I learn a lot about Steve Jobs, his invention, and his company. To most people, Steve was a Genious. But who would have known that he had a very conflicting personality. He was a firm believer in Hindu and Zen. Yet, he was obnoxious and very hard to deal with. He’d like to be at the intersection of technology and humanity. Yet, he was no humanitarian. He did everything in his own way regardless of whether his action will hurt others. I’m glad that I get to know that side of him.

This book is a bit long. It took me almost two months to read it. Despite excurciating details, I enjoy reading this book. The book contains the story since before his birth, his childhood, his success, his failure, his return, and his departure. It’s a long enjoyable book. And, it’s worth reading. The only problem that I have is that it’s a bit too long.

Dylan Baker is the narrator of the audiobook version. His voice is quite strong and nice. He kept me engaged in the book for the whole time.

Table of Contents 

• Chapter 1--Introduction: How this book came to be
• Chapter 2--Childhood: abandoned and chosen
• Chapter 3--Odd couple: the two Steves
• Chapter 4--The dropout: turn on, tune in ...
• Chapter 5--Atari and India: Zen and the art of game design
• Chapter 6--The Apple I: turn on, boot up, jack in ...
• Chapter 7--The Apple II: dawn of a new age
• Chapter 8--Chrisann and Lisa: he who is abandoned ...
• Chapter 9--Xerox and Lisa: graphical user interfaces
• Chapter 10--Going public: a man of wealth and fame
• Chapter 11--The Mac is born: you say you want a revolution
• Chapter 12--The reality distortion field: playing by his own set of rules
• Chapter 13--The design: real artists simplify
• Chapter 14--Building the Mac: the journey is the reward
• Chapter 15--Enter Sculley: the Pepsi challenge
• Chapter 16--The launch: a dent in the universe
• Chapter 17--Gates and Jobs: when orbits intersect
• Chapter 18--Icarus: what goes up ...
• Chapter 19--NeXT: Prometheus unbound
• Chapter 20--Pixar: technology meets art
• Chapter 21--A regular guy: love is just a four-letter word
• Chapter 22--Family man: at home with the Jobs clan
• Chapter 23--Toy story: Buzz and Woody to the rescue
• Chapter 24--The second coming: what rough beast, its hour come round at last ...
• Chapter 25--The restoration: the loser now will be later to win
• Chapter 26--Think different: Jobs as iCEO
• Chapter 27--Design principles: the studio of Jobs and Ive
• Chapter 28--The iMac: hello (again)
• Chapter 29--CEO: still crazy after all these years
• Chapter 30--Apple stores: genius bars and siena sandstone
• Chapter 31--The digital hub: from iTunes to the iPod
• Chapter 32--The iTunes store: I'm the Pied Piper
• Chapter 33--Music man: the sound track of his life
• Chapter 34--Pixar's friends: ... and foes
• Chapter 35--Twenty-first-century Macs: setting Apple apart
• Chapter 36--Round one: Memento mori
• Chapter 37--The iPhone: three revolutionary products in one
• Chapter 38--Round two: the cancer recurs
• Chapter 39--The iPad: into the post-PC era
• Chapter 40--New battles: and echoes of old ones
• Chapter 41--To infinity: the cloud, the spaceship, and beyond
• Chapter 42--Round three: the twilight struggle
• Chapter 43--Legacy: the brightest heaven of invention

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make  notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.