How do you start learning about computers? The opinions about this particular subject have a cardinality close to the number of computer scientists or IT professionals on the planet. Everyone will have their own opinion, but a single book published in 2000 might have helped everyone reach an agreement, and that is no small feat.

A quick review of previous entries in the Library section of this magazine shows that it does not feature any book from The Pragmatic Programmers, for no other reason than gross oversight. We have discussed books from MIT Press, Addison-Wesley, O'Reilly, and many other publishing houses, and now it is time to solve this issue. This month we will elaborate on "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git", a 2008 book by Travis Swicegood.

Here is a confession. The first drafts of this issue of De Programmatica Ipsum were written under the name "Structured Programming". Understandably enough, the news of Niklaus Wirth's passing triggered a prompt renaming and the choice of a somewhat narrower focus. However, Pascal's rise in popularity during the 1970s and 1980s cannot be explained unless we elaborate on Structured Programming, and this month's Library book is among the most important ones ever written about the subject.

Last September, we reviewed our first "coffee table book": a precious and unwieldy volume by Taschen called “The Computer”, written by Jens Müller and Julius Wiedemann. At the end of that article, we mentioned another coffee table book, and it is about time we talk about it in detail. This month's Library entry is, then, "Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation" by Alex Wiltshire, featuring photographs by John Short, published by MIT Press in 2020.