I almost returned “Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson” to the library unread. Dave Winer’s Why Jobs chose Isaacson and Thomas Q Brady’s Steve Jobs picked the wrong guy had created doubt in my mind. It was a library book, so I had no skin in the game. But Jobs was a totem for my generation of developers and I started leafing through the pages.

The pages pulled me in. I knew the main story. I knew much of the back story. But the biography depicted a depth and nuance that was all new to me. And so I inhaled the book over the weekend.

In the end, Winer and Brady were right. The Isaacson biography was authoritative, but not illuminating. Worth reading, but not worth a spot on my bookshelf (digital or analog).