I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone without a very deep interest in Steve Jobs Studies. But after 15 years of searching (yes, I'm a die hard), I think I finally got my first true glimpse of the pre-Apple Steve.

Of course TBITA is not a remotely business/technical oriented narrative. That's what's really still missing in the field of Steve Jobs Studies We have some good general histories (Pirates, new movies, Apple books). We have some good personal narratives (Isaacson, Brennan, Wozniak's iWoz, and Mona Simpson's novel A Regular Guy which is well known to be about him and just an awesome book even if it weren't). Yet the best business narrative we have other than magazine cover stories is probably Folklore.org and The Second Coming of Steve Jobs (Deutschman) which Steve himself called "A Hatchet Job." It's certainly an entertaining read (and it still makes an impression) but it doesn't cover the important 2000s period, and it's a bit too thin to really get into the sort of depth about NeXT, Pixar, and early days at Apple that the field needs. The next best sources are the also-ran Apple CEO memoirs (Amelio, Sculley - which while decent books in themselves are largely self serving and mostly off topic) and primary sources...