Objective: Collect recommendations on books that I don’t know about.
Computer Science
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software; Charles Petzold
Not much concrete things said in , but a couple of users remark that it got them into CS. Clear presentation of concepts that programmers “tend to know” in a hand-wavy sort of way.
Don’t Make Me Think; Steve Krug
Faculty member uses it as a required text in most of their UX classes.
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks; Bruce Tate
Introduced Erlang, which finally got them to Functional Programming, and eventually distributed systems and databases. Covers Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang and Ruby.
The Nature of Code; Daniel Shiffman
doesn’t say much about the why, but its ToC looks inviting as it involves a lot of visualization: vectors, forces, oscillation, particle systems, physics libraries, autonomous agents, cellular automata, fractals, evolution of code, and neural networks.
Governance
Seeing Like a State; James C. Scott
Illustrates how difficult it is to actually manage a country and an economy well, even with scientific management, stats, etc. Complementary reading: Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore | Hacker News .
Statistics
Statistical Inference; Vijay Rohatgi and Models for Probability and Statistical Inference; James Stapleton
Unlike theory-building books that take too long to get to the point, these two books have a bag-of-tricks-and-when-they-work approach.
Epistemology
How to Read a Book; Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren
Had a huge impact on how an academic read and thought about academic papers.
Would complement the ideas in the On Learning and Thoughts on Academic Research pages.
References
- Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study? news.ycombinator.com . Accessed Mar 27, 2022.
- Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study? news.ycombinator.com . Accessed Sep 10, 2022.
- Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. pragprog.com . Accessed Sep 10, 2022.
- The Nature of Code > Preface. Saniel Shiffman. natureofcode.com . Accessed Sep 10, 2022.
Might offer a deeper background to the Tech and Democracy section.