Silicon Valley veterans and newbies alike will want to explore this book that delves into the rich history behind the region that birthed the world's most important industry. Technology journalist Ashlee Vance has captured almost every aspect of the area stretching between San Francisco and San Jose, California, starting with the eager radio and electronics enthusiasts of the early 1900s and ending with the computing powerhouses of today such as Google and Apple. Along the way, the book profiles the people and places that have elevated Silicon Valley to an almost mythic pedestal. This book delivers Silicon Valley, taking us from success story to failed startup and back again as we drive the roads from San Francisco to Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and San Jose. It's full of profiles of the larger-than-life characters that pioneered the processor, computer, and Internet revolutions. The book's vibrant design includes "Silicon Valley Soundbytes" packed with insider information and trivia, and "Click Here" sidebars, which suggest places to eat, drink, and shop. Place by place, readers get the inside scoop on all the addresses that count, which include Microsoft research centers; the headquarters of Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle; research powerhouses such as Stanford University, NASA Ames, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the Computer History Museum and The Tech Museum; the Shoreline Amphitheater; the Churchill Club; and many more.

This sweeping history explores the growing Latino presence in the United States over the past two hundred years. It also debunks common myths about Silicon Valley, one of the world's most influential but least-understood places. Far more than any label of the moment, the devil of racism has long been Silicon Valley's defining force, and Stephen Pitti argues that ethnic Mexicans--rather than computer programmers--should take center stage in any contemporary discussion of the "new West." Pitti weaves together the experiences of disparate residents--early Spanish-Mexican settlers, Gold Rush miners, farmworkers transplanted from Texas, Chicano movement activists, and late-twentieth-century musicians--to offer a broad reevaluation of the American West. Based on dozens of oral histories as well as unprecedented archival research, The Devil in Silicon Valley shows how San José, Santa Clara, and other northern California locales played a critical role in the ongoing development of Latino politics. This is a transnational history. In addition to considering the past efforts of immigrant and U.S.-born miners, fruit cannery workers, and janitors at high-tech firms--many of whom retained strong ties to Mexico--Pitti describes the work of such well-known Valley residents as César Chavez. He also chronicles the violent opposition ethnic Mexicans have faced in Santa Clara Valley. In the process, he reinterprets not only California history but the Latino political tradition and the story of American labor. This book follows California race relations from the Franciscan missions to the Gold Rush, from the New Almaden mine standoff to the Apple janitorial strike. As the first sustained account of Northern California's Mexican American history, it challenges conventional thinking and tells a fascinating story. Bringing the past to bear on the present, The Devil in Silicon Valley is counter-history at its best.

The fertile Santa Clara Valley--once called the Valley of Heart's Delight and later Silicon Valley--has long been home to a substantial Chinese population. Like other immigrants, they arrived seeking opportunity and armed with survival instincts and the ability to persevere, but the struggles they faced were unique. From 1866 to 1931, five distinct Chinatowns existed in San Jose, each one devastated by mysterious fires or stifled by unjust laws. Early Chinese in the region labored relentlessly, building railroads and levees and toiling as laundrymen, grocers, cooks, servants, field hands, and factory workers. In the 20th century, new industries replaced agriculture, and an influx of Chinese invigorated the valley with innovative ideas, helping it emerge as a leader in technology.

Today the Santa Clara Valley is known as the Silicon Valley. However, not so long ago it was called the "Valley of Heart's Delight". Lisa Prince Newman grew up in that special time and place, among the fruit and nut orchards that surrounded her home town of Saratoga. She discovered her love for baking with the bounty of fruit ripening just outside her family's kitchen door. Lisa's passion for apricots fills this book with recipes that showcase the singular flavor and surprising versatility of the California apricot. Deeply influenced by the Santa Clara Valley's natural beauty and agricultural heritage, Lisa celebrates the apricot, its people, and its history in this very personal cookbook. For the Love of Apricots showcases 68 recipes from Breakfast to Cocktails that show you how to enjoy apricots throughout the year. A unique cookbook/memoir, For the Love of Apricots is a tribute to the orchardists and farmers who continue to grow California's most wonderful fruit.

In the late 1960s, African American protests and Black Power demonstrations in California’s Santa Clara County—including what’s now called Silicon Valley—took many observers by surprise. After all, as far back as the 1890s, the California constitution had legally abolished most forms of racial discrimination, and subsequent legal reform had surely taken care of the rest. White Americans might even have wondered where the black activists in the late sixties were coming from—because, beginning with the writings of Fredrick Jackson Turner, the most influential histories of the American West simply left out African Americans or, later, portrayed them as a passive and insignificant presence. Uninvited Neighbors puts black people back into the picture and dispels cherished myths about California’s racial history. Reaching from the Spanish era to the valley’s emergence as a center of the high-tech industry, this is the first comprehensive history of the African American experience in the Santa Clara Valley. Author Herbert G. Ruffin II’s study presents the black experience in a new way, with a focus on how, despite their smaller numbers and obscure presence, African Americans in the South Bay forged communities that had a regional and national impact disproportionate to their population. As the region industrialized and spawned suburbs during and after World War II, its black citizens built institutions such as churches, social clubs, and civil rights organizations and challenged socioeconomic restrictions. Ruffin explores the quest of the area’s black people for the postwar American Dream. The book also addresses the scattering of the black community during the region’s late yet rapid urban growth after 1950, which led to the creation of several distinct black suburban communities clustered in metropolitan San Jose. Ruffin treats people of color as agents of their own development and survival in a region that was always multiracial and where slavery and Jim Crow did not predominate, but where the white embrace of racial justice and equality was often insincere. The result offers a new view of the intersection of African American history and the history of the American West.

This book is the first history of Silicon Valley from 1900 to the 2010s. It is a comprehensive study of the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the world, from the establishment of Stanford University to the age of social media. The underlying objective is to find the reason why it was Silicon Valley, and not some place on the East Coast or in Europe, that became the creative technological hub of the 21st century. Silicon Valley did not happen in a vacuum: the book also explores the surrounding social and cultural environment of the Bay Area. This "green" book follows the "red book" od 2012, which was the (sold out) first edition coauthored with Arun Rao, and the "blue book", which was Arun's proof-edited and expanded second edition of all chapters. The 600-page blue book is still available and contains both my old chapters and Arun's chapters. This 500-page green edition contains only my chapters (basically, the chronology) updated to 2015 and with many additions to early chapters and a new chapter on Asia.