Home Computers

Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation, by Alex Wiltshire.
This could be categorized as a coffee-table book, although it has generous information about each of the machines (about 3 to 5 paragraphs for each, in small type).
The machines are all professionally photographed from the archive of The Centre for Computing History, in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

It highlights machines from the Altair up to the iMac, including quite obscure ones like the Intertec Superbrain, the Olympia People and the Canon V-20 as well as the 8-bit trinity and beyond.
As its centered on a museum archive, the collection is somewhat slanted as exemplified by the curiosity in its selection of japanese computers. The aforementioned Canon is present, as well as a few Sharp (but no X1 or X68000) and the Sord M5 - yet no NEC or Fujitsu.
Another point is that the text uses no references, or only references within the book (referencing another computer in a different page for instance). So some of the facts on offer have to be taken with a grain of salt. This I also find curious as the author is a games journalist and the museum, having a purpose of documenting history. I would have expected some referenced knowledge to back up some of the articles' quotes.
Apart from these two points it's a wonderful book to browse, the photography is very high quality, the book dimensions are generous for this sort of project and it helps paint a picture of the madcap 1980s in terms of personal computers. A true gold rush with companies forming left right and centre to put out weird incompatible machines with no software as a hot item.
Although it's not too centered on games, there is some context regarding games (most of these computers' main purpose was indeed as games machines).
I have to recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in computer history. Other books have gone much deeper into specific computers (wonderful books available on the Apple II and C64, for instance), but none that take on 100 at a time, with something interesting to say about all of them and great pictures to boot.