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Rating: 
Summary: A Huge Disappointment
Review: Ada Lovelace had a rich intellectual life. As a huge disservice to her, this book is one extended gossip column of speculation and opinion about her personal life and that of her parents. In contrast, only a few pages are devoted to the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. At first I thought the author was gossiping about her parents as what he considered a necessary background to understanding Ada, so I kept reading, hoping to get to the substance of the book soon-- but the gossip never stopped, right through the description of her death. If you too have a rich intellectual life, you will enjoy this book as much as you enjoy reading gossip about celebrities in the National Enquirer.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but not really that great
Review: As a historian of science and technology, and also a person very interested in computer science and fascinated by poetry as well, this book looked like a full 5 stars at first. Like some of the other reviewers, I felt swamped by the details of Ada's emotional life; yet, there are flashes of brilliance where the author makes a clear connection between her social position, her interior life as we can best judge it, and her pursuits. I wonder if there would have been a better way to organize the book; as it stands now, the book is almost purely narrative (with some asides and flashbacks), and appears to be aimed at the popular reader with a seasoning of technical information to goad the more serious critic into reading on. On the positive side, I was pleased to read a clarification of Ada's role in the Babbage Difference Engine's precocious presentation. And at times, the story was fascinating. Other times, it was just plain soggy.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating woman in a fascinating age
Review: Every computer programmer knows (or should) that Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, honored with the name of the DoD's official programming language. What I didn't know was that she was the daughter of Byron, the poet. Her parents were a very strange match, actually: Byron the flamboyant Romantic poet and Annabella Millbanke, a coldly rational woman he dubbed "the Princess of Parallelograms." Their relationship was a brief one, followed by a bitter estrangement, but it produced a daughter, Ada. Ada was raised exclusively by her mother, seemingly more as a science project - a demonstration of rational childraising principles - than as anything involving parental affection. Not surprisingly, she grew up to be a brilliant woman prone to nervous disorders which, when combined with attempts at treatment, led to a short life, with her dying at 37. The focus of this book is set by the dichotomy between science and poetry exemplified by Byron and Annabella. The time period is one of extraordinary technical advancement, with the locomotive and the telegraph shrinking the world in a way that even our jet planes and satellite links can't compare. Some embraced this revolution, even some of the poets, while others rejected it. Those like me who came to this book looking for a detailed account of Ada and her association with Babbage and his Difference Engine will come away disappointed. It is indeed covered, and Woolley describes Ada's monograph on the principles of the Engine as being a hundred years ahead of its time. But after providing a copious lead-in (to such an extent that Annabella seems as much the subject as Ada), he quickly moves on to the latter part of her life. Still, this is an interesting book about a fascinating age and fascinating people.
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