#GodAwful Interesting, accomplished man, but a badly written book. Most celebrities get an author or reporter to help write their bios, and Woz did -but it was still awful. It had a few decent spots, but overall, a long, tedious, simplistic book from Apple's brilliant blowhard. Written like atranscription of an interview of someone stuck in 7th grade on espresso.

Steve Wozniak is a fascinating personality and the father of the modern personal computer. His story deserves to be told in a manner befitting the impact he and his inventions have had on the world.

However, Woz, despite his genius with electronics, is not a writer. Nor, apparently, is his co-author. This book's writing is amateurish and unengaging. In the hands of a qualified biographer, this could have been one of the most arresting biographies of the last 30 years. Instead, it reads like a very long, very simple blog post.

Skip this book, and just read "Fire in the Valley" instead.

Ok, I do have to admit that I haven't finished the book (nor do I want to at this point - but someday I may pick up where I left off.) I was first interested in reading this because I thought that the guy who invented Apple "must" be a pretty interesting guy. Maybe he is...but it doesn't come across in this book. He comes across as the most arrogant, self-centered, self-important person EVER! I know that autobiographies are about one's life - but I guess I am more drawn to people who can give and share credit, who approach life with a team-oriented mindset, and who aren't self-absorbed. I think in the first 10 pages of this book I read the words, "I am the smartest," or "I am the best," or "I am the greatest," more than I can even count!

Don't get me wrong - I am thankful that there are those as smart as Mr. Wozniak, but I guess I am not intersted in them as people afterall. He should stick to inventing computers, and stay away from writing about his life.

Just my opinion...

A linguagem básica, com frequente uso de modismos e vícios, as ideias, as piadas e todo o conteúdo deixam claro que Wozniak é um nerd raiz até os ossos. Neste sentido o livro é primoroso pois dá a impressão de estarmos ouvindo o empreendedor em seu ritmo, inclusive na alternância de assuntos que, confesso, me deixou um pouco confuso. Resumindo, o livro é uma ode à engenharia.

Para profissionais da área a obra deve ser uma diversão pois ele entra na explicação de como desenvolveu alguns dos seus projetos mais queridos, inclusive no detalhamento de transistores, capacitores e etc. Ao mesmo tempo, ele aborda diversos outros assuntos amenos, mas é bastante objetivo em declarar o seu amor à engenharia como pura diversão e descoberta - mérito da influência do seu pai, algo bacana de acompanhar. Fora isso, é interessante ver como ele respeita a sua natureza ao descartar qualquer ideia de sair da área técnica para tornar-se um gestor/administrador.

Wozniak deixa transparecer o esforço para provar ser inovador, um pioneiro nato, muito além da Apple (apple II) e, nesse contexto, deixa uma percepção residual de frustração e ressentimento por falta de reconhecimento.

Para a tristeza de alguns, a relação dele com a Apple e Jobs é abordada de forma bastante superficial e, em alguns casos, percebe-se que usou o livro para esclarecer alguns mal entendidos - o que, pelo visto, ocorreu muito ao longo da carreira, provavelmente por ser objetivo e franco, ao melhor estilo nerd.

Por fim, o livro segue fielmente aos preceitos do que fez o vale do silício ser o que é. A leitura é válida pelos diversos fatos curiosos.

Steve Wozniak's excitement for technology and innovation is palpable and he seems like a really nice guy.

What a curious book! I have read bits and pieces about Steve Wozniak through the years, but never heard anything from the horse's mouth--until I read this book. Plenty have likely pointed out some very obvious flaws in this book, from Woz being perhaps a bit less than humble to the frankly mind-numbing repetitiveness of the book. But ignoring the problems with the prose, what emerges from the book is a picture of a great man, someone who is a genuinely good person and blessed with a very specific set of talents that he brought to bear at the right time in the right place. There were some good snippets on the origin of Apple here, too, but not as many as I expected.

In iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It, Steve Wozniak writes about the origin story of Apple, meeting his co-founder Steve Jobs, his upbringing, love for programming, and the values that has guided his decisions. He wrote the book to dispel some misconceptions about his relationship with Steve Jobs and feeling towards Apple.

Lucky Accident – Magazine

At about this time, there was another lucky accident. I found this article about computers in one of the old engineering journals my dad had hanging around. Back then, back in 1960, writing about computers wasn’t common at all. But what I saw was an article about the ENIAC and a picture of it. The ENIAC— which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer—was the first true computer by most people’s definition. It was designed to calculate bomb trajectories for the military during World War II. So it was designed back in the 1940s.

On Steve Jobs

I never had the courage to ask chip companies for free samples of what were then expensive chips. A year later I would meet Steve Jobs, who showed me how brave he was by scoring free chips just by calling sales reps. I could never do that. Our introverted and extroverted personalities (guess who’s which) really helped us in those days. What one of us found difficult, the other often accomplished pretty handily. Examples of that teamwork are all over this story.

One Step at a time

Not everyone gets this in today’s engineering community, you know. Throughout my career at Apple and other places, you always find a lot of geeks who try to reach levels without doing the in-between ones first, and it won’t work. It never does. That’s just cognitive development, plain and simple. You can’t teach somebody two cognitive steps above from where you are—and knowing that helped me with my own children as well as with the fifth graders I taught later on. I kept telling them, like a mantra: One step at a time.

Serendipity

Losing my Pinto changed my life completely. One of the major parts of my life at Berkeley was taking groups of people down to Southern California or even as far south as Tijuana, Mexico, on weekends. Actually, my first thought after the crash wasn’t, Oh, thank god I’m alive, but Man, now I’m not going to be able to take my friends on wild adventures anymore.

The car crash was the main reason that, after this school year, my third year at Berkeley, I went back to work instead of coming back to school. I needed to earn money, not just for the fourth year of college but also for a new car. If I hadn’t gotten in the car accident that year, I wouldn’t have quit school and I might never have started Apple. It’s weird how things happen.

Grayscale Thinking

But the world isn’t black and white. It’s grayscale. As an inventor, you have to see things in grayscale. You need to be open. You can’t follow the crowd.

Forget the crowd

Forget the crowd. And you need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you’ve heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would. You don’t want to jump to conclusions, take a position too quickly, and then search for as much material as you can to support your side. Who wants to waste time supporting a bad idea? It’s not worth it, that way of being stuck in your ego. You don’t want to just come up with any excuse to support your way.

Self-Doubt

It’s so easy to doubt yourself, and it’s especially easy to doubt yourself when what you’re working on is at odds with everyone else in the world who thinks they know the right way to do things. Sometimes you can’t prove whether you’re right or wrong. Only time can tell that. But if you believe in your own power to objectively reason, that’s a key to happiness.

Trust your Intuition

And a key to confidence. Another key I found to happiness was to realize that I didn’t have to disagree with someone and let it get all intense. If you believe in your own power to reason, you can just relax. You don’t have to feel the pressure to set out and convince anyone. So don’t sweat it! You have to trust your own designs, your own intuition, and your own understanding of what your invention needs to be.

I gave up. I couldn't put myself through one more cobbled-together paragraph, one more juvenile description of a childhood experience, or one more repetition of a banal anecdote. I'm sure Steve's story is actually an incredibly interesting one; I just wish he'd chosen a more competent co-writer.

That the story of Apple Inc. Co-Founder (Steve Woznaik) in late 1970s and 1980s. This book is inspiring and motivating especially for Computer & I.T Professionals.

Executive Summary: They say you shouldn't meet your heroes. I think maybe they should amend that to include not reading your heroes' autobiographies. I still respect the accomplishments of Steve Wozniak, but I think I like him a little bit less now after having read this book.

Audiobook:

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Steve Jobs gets too much credit for the success of Apple. He always has, and he always will. Yes Steve Jobs was an incredible salesman with a great eye for where technology was heading, but without the incredible product that was the Apple II (and later other products like the iPod and iPhone made possible largely due to Jonathan Ive among others) Apple wouldn't be the brand it is today. It took both Steves to make Apple a success in those early days.

So I can understand why Steve Wozniak would want a book giving his account of things. Unfortunately he decided to write it himself why Steve Job's biography was written by the excellent Walter Isaacson. The quality of the prose show to be amateur. The subject matter is sporadic and in the early parts often tedious to listen to.

Did you know Steve Wozniak was smarter than other kids his age? No? Don't worry. He'll tell you that. A lot. To say Mr. Wozniak has a high opinion of himself is an understatement. To be fair to him, however he deserves it. I still own and love the hell out of my Apple II (The only apple product I own). His contributions to computers can not be ignored.

I found the first part of this book, and much of the last part of this book, pretty uninteresting and made me dislike Steve Wozniak a bit more for it. Nothing like my dislike of the person Steve Jobs seems to have been, but it's hard to find your heroes aren't quite who you think they are.

The best part of this book for me was all the stuff on the creation of Apple and the early designs for the Apple I and II. He gets into a bit more technical detail than I would have expected, but not so much as to turn this into a technical manual.

The final chapter was pretty interesting too, where he offers his advice on how to turn your ideas into reality and success. I'm not sure I agree with all of his opinions, but then who am I to disagree? He's far more accomplished than I'll ever be.

Overall I'm glad I finally picked this book up, but I wish it was either shorter/more focused or written by a professional biographer instead.

This is a worthy read for anyone interested in early personal computers and Steve Wozniak's development of the Apple I and Apple II, though people looking for a history of Apple the company or a general history of the PC revolution may be disappointed.

As mentioned in other reviews, this book basically reads like an extended conversation with Wozniak, which is both good and bad. The writing is straight forward and easy to follow, but it definitely could've used some editing (for example, when Wozniak discusses his amnesia after a plane crash, he mentions that he didn't even realize his dog was missing -- someone had boarded it while he was in the hospital -- twice within two paragraphs). It is a pretty quick read nonetheless.

He writes about growing up in California, his early interest in math, science, and especially electronics, and his proclivity for pranks. He writes about feeling like a hippy but ultimately being an outsider in their group because he wouldn't do drugs. He writes about building a "blue box" which allowed the user to make free phone calls and then, along with his friend Steve Jobs, selling them for a tidy profit. Although he states he never used the blue boxes himself for personal phone calls (because that would be stealing), he grudgingly admits he sold them to people who did and therefore makes what he and Jobs did illegal. The fact that he even considered this a gray matter made me question his perspective a bit.

It's not until around halfway through the book that Wozniak discusses the reason most people probably picked up the book -- creating the Apple I (and later the Apple II) and co-founding Apple Computer with Steve Jobs. At this point you figure he's going to get into the nitty gritty of the early Apple years, but it never really happens. It's clear that Wozniak's goal was to, once and for all, go on record as being the sole creator of the original Apple computers, and to make note of all the engineering innovations he came up with during their creation -- repeatedly, to the point of sounding rather boastful, as if everything he did was completely original and head and shoulders beyond what anyone else had ever done or would do. I have no doubt Wozniak is a great engineer but even I know he's giving a rather one-sided perspective. For example, he talks about creating the first Apple BASIC (explaining how he'd based it on HP BASIC and decided to save time by not including floating point math capability), but doesn't mention that due to its limitations, it was replaced a couple years later by a BASIC licensed from Microsoft (yes, that Microsoft).

Even as Apple grows and becomes a big company, he never discusses his day-to-day role or what happened there other than a few short asides. He spends several pages lamenting how Apple tried to push aside the Apple II to make way for the Apple III, and how that ultimately failed because the III was designed by marketers, not engineers. But that left me with the question, "Why wasn't Wozniak involved with the III?", which was never answered. Nor is the evolution of the Apple II discussed, other than Woz mentioning at one point that the IIc was his favorite version.

He also doesn't discuss Steve Jobs much (fair enough, this is Woz's book), and when he does Jobs invariably comes off quite badly, such as pre-Apple when Jobs is at Atari and convinces Wozniak to create a hardware prototype of the game Breakout in only four days. Wozniak does it and splits what Jobs tells him is a $750 payment, only to note that he later discovered Jobs was actually paid in the thousands for it. Or, after Wozniak quits Apple to head a universal remote start-up and has a design company he knows from his Apple days come up with the prototype, Jobs learns of this and (apparently upset over an article stating the Wozniak quit because too much attention was paid to the Macintosh development and not enough to the Apple II), smashes the prototype and tells them to send it back to Wozniak.

Overall it was still a worthwhile read and recommended for people interested in this era of computers.

I began reading this book as a follow-up to the excellent Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. What a great book this was! Steve Wozniak was the sole engineer who designed/invented the Apple computer, the first personal computer that worked with a keyboard and TV monitor. If you know anything about Steve Wozniak, you know that he is a down-to-earth and very honest regular guy. The wonderful thing about this book is that this is way the book reads and flows. Therefore, it's a very enjoyable and quick read.

Steve tells how his father explained engineering principles to him in such a way that he understood them completely and absorbed the information. This became the foundation of his passion and interest in engineering.

"The Woz" explains every step in his quest to design a personal computer, since he couldn't afford to buy one. He always kept redesigning this computer on paper, trying to utilize as few chips as possible. In between, we hear about his beloved job at Hewlett-Packard, building a "blue box" (device that makes free long distance phone calls), creating a dial-a-joke service, designing a game for Atari, and inventing the first universal remote. This man is brilliant, and Steve Jobs knew it.

Wozniak discusses the working atmosphere at Apple, his marriages, owning a movie theater, funding the US Music Festival, his love of being a father and becoming a computer teacher at his kids' school.

This is an excellent book told in an honest and informative fashion. In addition, it is the perfect companion to reading the Steve Jobs book.