Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age Book

I've long admired Grace Hopper but was relieved to read this biography in particular. Few biographical accounts of her go beyond "She was a pioneer!" and "She was a female computer programmer in the 1930s OMG!"

This biography goes into detail about her career and specific contributions (the development of the first compiler, programming methods, data flow charts, to name just a few things we still use regularly today). At times some of the material was even a bit dry for me, and I'm a geek (a trivial and far from pervasive shortcoming).

I appreciated the lack of "and she was FEMALE!" throughout the book, as other biographies of women often shove down one's throat, obviously and repeatedly. The author succeeds at pointing out that a substantial portion of the programming community was female, that it was not at all unusual at the time, and that there were more female Ph.D.s in mathematics during the 1930s than at almost any other time in history. It was so refreshing to hear facts rather than the usual simplistic Female Struggle story, and particularly one with such ample citation of primary resources, all too rare. Hurray for PRIMARY RESOURCE CITATIONS!

A cute anecdote resulted from my mentioning this book to my grandfather. He was a programmer at the Department of Defense for his entire career, but it never occurred to me that he may have known Grace Hopper - and he did. He said she was "quite a lady" and that he especially remembered her using wire to illustrate time across the computer.