Ask HN: What nonfiction books do you keep rereading?

"The Emperor of All Maladies". A haunting, personal, and intimate biography of cancer. Having been on the peripherals of several cancer patients, I find the book an incredible overview of the disease, and how to deal with its physical, mental, and societal consequences.

Every 2-3 years, particularly in the periods when I'm not actively in network engineering, I re-read this book from start-finish - and it just completely centers my mindset with regards to pretty much every fundamental topic in Network Engineering. There almost didn't need to be a 2nd Edition - most of the major topics were covered in 1st edition - the only major difference is the use of lots of protocol examples. The core material itself is timeless.

Here is just one gem from Chapter 5 - "Hubs, Switches, Virtual Lans and Fast Ethernet"

"I originally resisted adopting the term switch. Unlike thing, switch sounds like a word you'd apply to a well-defined concept, so it makes people assume that there is a crisp definition that everyone else knows. I thought the world was already confusing enough with the terms bridge and router. Unfortunately, people coined the word switch assuming they were inventing a new concept, somehow different from a bridge or a router. And there were various independent product concepts named switch. As "switch" vendors expanded the capabilities of their products, the products wound up being functionally the same as bridges and routers, usually a hybrid or superset. One cynical (and ungrammatical) definition I use for switch is "a marketing term that means fast." Almost all products these days are some hybrid or superset of bridges and routers. So maybe it's right for the industry to settle on a new word, switch, as a more generic term for a box that moves data."