Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. An excellent primer on technology, security, abuse of power, and a fun coming-of-age story. I think it does a decent job of introducing folks to open source and, cryptography.
Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
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Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#12Most meaningful is a hard measure, as there are a bunch within that grouping...
I'll share one from when I was in my 30s, Killer Of Men by Christian Cameron; the entire series is fantastic and came around just at the right time I needed it. It is the story of an older man telling the story of his life and looking back through those eyes (I really like that perspective and it helped me see some things). The entire series takes place in Ancient Greece and the Greco-Persian wars.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#13This is easy...Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged had a profound influence on me, too. It is a treatise on selfishness. A stench of arrogance leaks out from every paragraph. It showed me the worst of the worst. What not to be. I like to think reading it made me a more empathetic, social, caring person. It also awakened my antenna to the vileness in people that may lie just below the skin. That is was excruciatingly badly written was a bonus. It showed…
It had a profound influence on me as well, I read it as a celebration of creativity and the human spirit. I never got the weird cult stuff that has emerged from it.
I thought it was well written though. She just has a weird style; I kinda dug it. I would call it writing Brutalism, and it was very clear and to the point.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#14AMOS language reference book, when I was 12. It helped me to start my programming career, the best decision of my life.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#15Martin Gardner's Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions et al. I devoured them as a boy and made me want to be a mathematician, at which I failed. That failure turned into a 43 year career of puzzles with computers. Even now every day has a puzzle to be solved.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#16[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#17Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. Previously I was very pro government intervention, but this book is great at explaining basic economic principles while ignoring mathematics.
It might be called a little biased by mostly ignoring "market failures" yet basic physics also mostly ignore friction.
Also regarding "meaningful": I had tried to get an understanding of how society works for some time and had even tried reading Capital by Marx but in the end I found most I wanted in Basic Economics.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#18BusyBusy by Tony Crabbe changed my views on what really matters in jobs and in life!
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#19Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
It gave me a toolkit to survive getting sick and dealing with a life changing event.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#20Probably not as profound as others here but ‘Allen Carr’s easy way to stop smoking’ - I quit 15 years ago and because the pub was a massive trigger for me I spent the evenings learning how to program which led to my career, saved enough money to go travelling around Asia for six months and discovered cycling.