David Welch Pogue was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, U.S.A. the son of Richard Welch Pogue, an attorney and former Managing Partner at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue and Patricia. He is a grandson of L.Welch Pogue and Mary Ellen Edgerton. He is also a great nephew of Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device.

He graduated from Yale University in 1985, summa cum laude with Distinction in Music. He spent ten years working in New York, for a time in the office of Music Theatre International and also intermittently as a Broadway musical conductor.

Pogue married on September 16, 1995, at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Jennifer Letitia O'Sullivan, the daughter of Dr. Renee Bennett O'Sullivan of Wellesley, Massachusetts, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. She graduated from Brown University and received her medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania and was a hand and plastic surgeon for four years in Stamford, Connecticut. David and Jennifer are the parents of three children, sons Kelly and Jeffrey and daughter Tia.

On August 29, 2007 he received an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Music) from Shenandoah Conservatory of Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia.

Since November 2000, Pogue has served as the New York Times personal-tech columnist; his column, "State of the Art," appears each Thursday on the front page of the Business section. He also writes "From the Desk of David Pogue," a tech-related opinion column that is sent to readers by e-mail. He also maintains a blog at nytimes.com called Pogue's Posts.

Each Thursday, he appears on CNBC's "Power Lunch" in a taped, three-minute comic tech review, which then appears on the New York Times website, nytimes.com, as well as iTunes, YouTube, TiVo, and JetBlue.

Pogue wrote for Macworld Magazine from 1988-2000. His back-page column was called The Desktop Critic. Pogue got his start writing books when Macworld-owner IDG asked him to write Macs for Dummies to follow on the success of the first ...for Dummies book, DOS for Dummies, written by Dan Gookin.

In 2007, the HD Theater and Science channels aired his six-episode series, It's All Geek to Me, a how-to show about consumer technology.

He is the host of a new four-part PBS NOVA miniseries about materials science, tentatively called "Stuff," scheduled to air in October 2010.

He also writes and hosts several segments each year for CBS News Sunday Morning.

Pogue is a frequent speaker at educational, government, and corporate conferences. In 2009 he was the keynote speaker at the international Summit Conference of the Society for Technical Communication, the largest professional organization of technical writers and editors. Pogue also headlined the annual EduComm Conference, a nationwide gathering of higher education leaders pursuing breakthrough technologies with the potential to transform the college experience. He has performed three times at TED, a conference in Monterey, CA: in 2006, a 20-minute talk about simplicity; in 2007, a medley of high-tech song parodies at the piano (or, as Pogue joked, "a tedley,") and most recently in December 2008, talking about cellphones, the cool tricks they can be made to do, and how the phones are often so much better than the companies that market them. In 2008, he performed at the EG conference, also in Monterey. He has also spoken at the 2008 and 2009 ASTD TechKnowldge Conference and expo as a keynote speaker. On March 16, 2009, he was the keynote speaker for the ASSET conference in Huntington, New York. Also on 2009, he gave a conference about Web 2.0 at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico. He discussed three trends in technology and also played his entertaining technology songs.

Non-fiction

• Classical Music for Dummies
• Crossing Platforms: A Macintosh/Windows Phrasebook (with Adam C. Engst)
• CSS: the Missing Manual
• The Flat-Screen iMac for Dummies
• GarageBand: the Missing Manual
• GarageBand 2: the Missing Manual
• The Great Macintosh Easter Egg Hunt
• The iBook for Dummies
• iLife '04: The Missing Manual
• iLife '05: The Missing Manual
• The iMac for Dummies
• iMovie: The Missing Manual
• iMovie 2: The Missing Manual
• iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
• iMovie 4 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
• iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual
• iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
• iPhoto: The Missing Manual
• iPhoto 2: The Missing Manual
• iPhoto 4: The Missing Manual
• iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual
• iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual
• Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual
• Mac OS X: The Missing Manual
• Mac OS X Hints (with Rob Griffiths)
• Macs for Dummies
• Macworld Mac Secrets (with Joseph Schorr)
• Magic for Dummies
• The Microsloth Joke Book: A Satire (editor)
• More Macs for Dummies
• Opera for Dummies (with Scott Speck)
• PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide
• Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual
• Tales from the Tech Line: Hilarious Strange-But-True Stories from the Computer Industry's Technical-Support Hotlines (editor)
• The Weird Wide Web (with Erfert Fenton)
• Windows Me: The Missing Manual
• Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
• Windows Vista for Starters: The Missing Manual
• Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual
• Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual
• The World According to Twitter

Fiction

• Hard Drive (1993), a techno-thriller
• "Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magical Power" (2010, novel for middle-schoolers)

In 2005, Pogue was the subject of a conflict-of-interest controversy. In a New York Times review of a hard drive recovery service, Pogue noted that the service, which can cost from $500 to $2,700, was provided at no charge for the purposes of the review; but when describing the service for National Public Radio's Morning Edition program on September 12, 2005, he failed to mention this. NPR's Vice President of News Bill Marimow later stated that NPR should have either not aired the review or paid for the services itself. Ultimately, the Times paid for the service.