Journalist Steven Levy's new book, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness, chronicles the popular portable digital media player iPod's development, from the first inkling of an idea to the final product, which was the result of many rounds of hardware and software builds that were painstakingly scrutinized by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. A Forbes article notes that the book even offers its own version of the iPod's shuffle capability, by placing the same essay at the front of each copy but randomly distributing the other essays.

An engineer told Mr. Levy that a hardware or software build was handed to Mr. Jobs each Friday, rather than the traditional mid-week deadline, so that he could "take it home for the weekend and play with it. Steve would be horribly offended [if] he couldn't get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes of a button." Lists of issues to address would be distributed each Monday.

Mr. Levy told Fortune: "Jobs certainly has an aesthetic that permeates the whole company. He can be super, super critical--it can be very frustrating to work with him. Yet after a horrible evaluation, you crawl back to your office and try again--and this time, you surpass what you thought you could do."