Reading is absolutely a powerful thing. Through books we can expose ourselves to new things, improve our understanding of the world and make us a better decision maker. Imagination is also stimulated, together with memory, ultimately making us a better learner.
This applies to learning technology too, in fact in this article I want to suggest a few books that can really help you understand blockchain from many different angles. This way you can build a solid foundation knowledge, and you can then adventure in more complex books or advanced online articles.
This foundation knowledge is essential especially if you are a programmer and you want to get into blockchain software development. Also if you are an investor, and need to select the best startups to invest in, the more knowledge you have the more you can make accurate predictions.
Let’s first reason about what’s different between learning blockchain from online articles vs learning it from books, and why we need both.
They are two different worlds in my opinion, and both are necessary.
Books talk about a topic usually as a whole. Since books have a lot of pages to host content they have the space to explain a topic from A to Z. Their negative side is that they take way longer to read than an article, so you need to be organized and allocate some quiet time for reading.
Online articles on the other hand are short to read and can fit into any busy schedule. The problem is that they are usually about only a facet of a topic, since they are around 1000 or 2000 words long.
So can you see why if you combine the two sources of information you can start understanding blockchain very rapidly? You can follow a structured book over time, and in between day breaks you can fill up the knowledge gaps with online articles.
A book from a skilled author will also have the advantage of getting you to know the author’s way of thinking, and how he or she reasons about problems. It’s like actually spending some time with the author without rush and talk about the topic.
So without further ado let’s introduce some of the best books that you can find about blockchain. They are not in any particular order.
The authors are Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, father and son.
Don is a Canadian business strategist with a career as an executive, business consultant and author. He is the CEO of Tapscott Group, a think tank in Canada.
Alex, his son, is the CEO and Founder of NextBlock Global, an investment company in the blockchain ecosystem.
Together they co-founded the Blockchain Research Institute.
This book is perfect for newbies, people who don’t have a full understanding of what blockchains can do but also whoever is simply looking for a new fresh explanation of the basics.
The major criticism of this book is that it doesn’t really consider technical feasibility or overall business improvements, but focuses just on the idea of applying blockchain to various business areas.
This is great for the beginner that needs to understand what a blockchain is and what is able to do, but it’s not the best kind of knowledge for the seasoned expert that wants to solve problems in a specific business application and figure out numbers and technical feasibility.
Click the following link to get it on Amazon. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
This book is my favorite out of all, no doubt. The author is one of the very very few people in the blockchain world that does not aim to be a noisy crypto price-predicting guru. He is a very knowledgeable and academic computer science and math educator.
His background is also in cybersecurity and he researched distributed networks in depth long before Bitcoin came. It would be cool if I can get an interview with him for the blog!
Andreas educates the public through books and conferences about the technological, scientific, political and sociological power of bitcoin and blockchains.
His talks are brilliant and they follow a straight logic that explains you every valuable details of this technology.
During the times when the internet was born, he was in college and witnessed very closely that technological revolution. Needless to say he now has a unique perspective on almost every topic.
If the previous book was mostly suggested for newbies, this one definitely is not. I would recommend it to a developer, a medium-knowledgeable person or to a very motivated beginner.
This because it uses a lot of real bitcoin core code examples to illustrate every single mechanism that makes a digital currency, and therefore a distributed ledger, work.
You don’t need necessarily to be a developer in order to follow the book and learn how the technology works, but if you are, and you happen to know some Python and C++, you will get so much extra knowledge juice out.
Click the following link to get it on Amazon. Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain
William Mougayar is a consultant, a mentor and an advisor for tech entrepreneurs. He focuses on business strategy, marketing and growth.
Since 2013 he has been studying the blockchain closely, and participated in various investments, research, mentoring and writings.
This book is appropriate especially for business executives and managers that currently work, or plan to work in the blockchain industry.
After reading it you will be able to start thinking about your own proof of concepts that will also make sense financially and business-wise. You will also know how to quantify your idea in terms of feasibility, costs and magnitude of infrastructure improvement.
Again this is best for getting a practical enterprise-focused point of view, as most of the author’s career experience comes from that ecosystem. This book is not suggested to beginners or first-time blockchain readers.
Click the following link to get it on Amazon. The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
This book was written by five brilliant people, they are: Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist and assistant professor at Princeton University, Joseph Bonneau, a cryptography researcher and assistant professor at NYU, Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, Andrew Miller, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois and Steven Goldfeder, a fourth year computer science PhD student at Princeton.
Such a mix of minds straight from universities makes this book a very academic and complete text. Therefore is suitable for beginners or noobs, but can also be appreciated by more expert readers.
The book has the right amount of detail that makes the readers understand all the core technologies as they happen, but it does not drown the reader into too much technical details and programming code.
Overall very accessible and definitely readable. There is a very interesting chapter on ‘Community, Politics, and Regulation‘.
Click the following link to get it on Amazon. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction
Phil Champagne is a Software Engineer in Internet-related protocols from Canada, who is been studying bitcoin since 2012. He currently works as a developer.
He participates in many projects both related and unrelated to blockchain, giving him an all-round knowledge of software and technology stacks.
This book is unique from the other ones because it does not aim to teach blockchain alone, but it provides a close encounter with the character of the creator: Satoshi Nakamoto.
The author collected all of Nakamoto’s quotes and official text, then he created a whole reading experience that will make you understand the basics of bitcoin and blockchain just as if the creator was explaining them to you directly.
This is a must-have if you are fascinated by the mysterious persona of Satoshi, the person/people that gave bitcoin to the world. This is exactly when, the blockchain revolution started.
Click the following link to get it from Amazon: The Book Of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto
This book’s author is the same person that I mentioned earlier along the book “mastering bitcoin”: Andreas M. Antonopoulos.
As I previously highlighted, this guy is an absolute must-follow if you want to learn blockchain and blockchain-related technologies from a trusted academic authority.
This book goes beyond the technical details of how things work. In fact it starts connecting dots and explains how bitcoin and blockchain bring significant implications in phiolosophy, sociology, and history.
In this book especially you find a lot of very interesting parallelisms between bitcoin and the internet, which nobody can deny that it completely revolutionized our civilization.
Click the following link to get it on Amazon: The Internet of Money
Melanie Swan, MBA, is an Affiliate scholar of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. She is also the principal of the MS Futures Group.
We can define her as a philosopher and science and technology futurist.
The book wants to go beyond cryptocurrencies and focuses mostly on the idea of blockchain as a foundation for the next generation of applications.
The idea of blockchain ‘1.0’ is explored, then blockchain ’2.0’ is introduced as an evolution from the classic bitcoin blockchain to ethereum’s blockchain-powered smart contracts.
This is a more entertaining, less scholarly book. Suggested for the newbie and the medium level readers.
Click the following link to get it on Amazon: Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
These are definitely not the ONLY good books about blockchain. There are many smart people in these world, therefore there are a lot of other good books outside of this list.
Feel free to suggest your favorite blockchain book in the comments below, and tell us why you like it!
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