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The short version of this review is if you're looking for a book about Ada, this is not it.

My biggest frustration with this book is that it is so padded with additional information. It would be one thing if it was other side tid bits about Ada's life that did not necessarily pertain to her contributions that this book claims to be about, but it isn't. There is too much side tracks on people and events that have nothing to do with Ada. The first few chapters go into Lord Byron when he wasn't even involved in her life, and could have been significantly reduced to a few paragraphs to get the same idea across. Babbage I can understand a little more, but even then there were times I was wondering why the author decided to focus on him at some points of the book. There were also periods where the author would go on tangents on other figures that Ada interacted with. While yes these people were in her life, they held no relevance to Ada's work. Honestly, why is Charles Dickens talked about so much??

Whole letters are sited so often that eventually I started to just skim them because it felt like they were being used to make the book longer. Sometimes they were interesting, but again more often than not I was wondering what the point of having this entire letter was. The letters combined with the many irrelevant tangents made this book a slog.

The kicker in all of this is it takes more than half the book to get to the point the author finally talks about Ada's work. Except when he gets to the portion of her notes that talk about her algorithm, the author quickly sums up that yes, Note G is where her algorithm resides and moves on without ever talking more in depth about it. So you slog through all these side stories that don't matter and the background of Babbage's machine just to have the author not even talk about what it is laid out in the title of the book. It is incredibly disappointing and frustrating. At that point I was close to the end anyways and finished the book out of spite more than anything.

There are probably much better informed, and better written, sources on Ada and her work. Save yourself the trouble of this book, because it talks about everything except Ada.