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Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?

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11–18 of 18 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?

#11
I'm a marketer, although there are a lot of "must-haves", I'd say the one I keep coming back to is "The Ultimate Sales Machine" by Chet Holmes

For those interested in other books for marketing, I compiled a list here (most even have book summaries already for convenience): https://share.justbeepit.com/screenshot/647f77b9b37c52001425...

Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?

#13
I don't think I could ever pick a single book, but Clean Architecture by Robert Martin is a favorite of mine. Really helped shape the design of testable systems for me. Once I actually started writing automated tests for my code, it turns out things broke in production a lot less, who would have thought? I don't like what is probably his most popular book, Clean Code, though.

Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?

#14
Chocolates & Confections by Peter P. Greweling. It's full of recipes, but more importantly there are large sections of information about how the cooking process actually works, how each ingredient effects the end result, why things like excess humidity can cause things to not set, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?

#16
The bible of machinists everywhere is Machinery's Handbook[1]

I've got an old copy, but they tend to remain useful for generations, as the basics really don't change very often. When you've got to make a bevel gear, and all you have is involute cutters, they've got the formula and details to get an acceptable one-off.

If you're cutting an ACME thread, they've got it covered, etc.

If you want to see for yourself, you can borrow a copy from the Internet Archive[2]

[1] https://books.industrialpress.com/machinery-handbook/

[2] https://archive.org/search?query=+Machinery%27s+Handbook

Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is: DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. https://www.amazon.com/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docum... But, nobody will read it. Tree models irrationally scare the shit out of most developers. Most people would rather cut off an arm and work 10x harder for less money than navigate a tree. It’s super weird. However, if you are a person who isn’t autistically riddled with fears you lie to yourself about understanding…

I couldn't find a preview for the 2nd edition, but the 1st edition seemed quite out of date? The frontend work I tend to be dealing with at this point in my career usually involve proper web "apps" (dashboards, visualizations, editors, etc) rather than the web "pages" that the DOM was well suited for. The main difference is the need for client-side state and realtime interactivity that doesn't need a full backend rer…

Think about it like this: Proper web apps means SPA, which means some giant stupid framework (Angular, React, Vue). These frameworks solve only two problems: architecture in a box and putting text on screen. They really don’t do anything else. That is why most frontend developers can’t do anything else.

The compile target of the browser is the DOM. This is just as true now as it was in 1998. If you want to do more than put text on screen you need to dive deeper. Your giant framework won’t/can’t give you that.

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