One book I read recently during my trip was "The Google Story" by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed. The book is approximately 300 pages and outlines the growth of Google from its beginnings at Stanford University to the mega-empire it is today. Taken from the back cover:

In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, "change the world" through a powerful search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, this fast-moving narrative takes you inside the creation and growth of a fun-loving firm whose unorthodox ways have enabled it to challenge Microsoft's dominance, shake up Wall Street, and rewrite the rules of advertising on the way to becoming a $130 billion behemoth. The Google Story reveals ambitious and controversial new projects - including secret plans to build a searchable genetic database - as well as troubling personal-privacy issues that may come to test the founders' guiding mantra: DON'T BE EVIL.

Even though it was 300 pages long, it was an easy read. In fact, I started and finished the book during my flight to New York City. Even though it was not large print, it was a captivating read and was organized quite well. The book covers the humble beginnings and goes into some detail about how the company came to be, its growth, and the mindset as to how both Larry and Sergey grew the company. There was no code in the book (obviously), as this was a business profile of a technical company, but there was definitely one thing to have been learned from that book:

The way the rules are set out are not set in stone.

Case in point: The book discussed how the company went about their IPO in a manner that contradicted how Wall Street dictated it. Instead of following all the small rules and declaring shares the way that industry had dictated in the past, they decided to do something different and instead set up a lottery-type system where anyone could purchase the Google stock. This resulted in one of the largest IPOs in Wall Street's history, and they did it their way. It also showed that you have to follow SOME of the process, as the IPO almost didn't happen due to some potential legal issues, but with perseverence and the focus that what they are doing is right and needed, they succeeded.

It also showed some insight into the company as a whole. For example, their hired their own chef to feed the employees. It wasn't your standard burgers and fries type kitchen either; this was a full blown chef that fed the staff something different every day. Odds are they also served the normal cafeteria type food, but they gave that extra value to the employees which shows how much the company values the employees. 

The company also follows the 80-20 rule - 80% of the time is spent on company business; 20% on side projects that interest the employees. Many of the 20% projects have turned into real applications currently being used - Google Groups and GMail, for example. These were side projects that began by some employees, got buy in from upper management and resources allocated to it to expand it to a real project so it would fall into the 80% category, and then grow into a large service used by the public. Google has approached this uniquely in a few ways as well - their internal testing was done in-house with Google employees as their beta testers. They had a large base of people to test the applications on and then release to the public slowly but surely to ensure that there was minimal impact to those already on the system.

Overall, the book was well written and showed how the project grew from an idea of 2 college students to a full blown ... well, empire that covers a number of services and strives to keep their main basic premise.