I'm getting great value out of this list. Can anybody recommend a book that has helped them become a more productive and efficient developer?
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
111–120 of 211 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#112Non-fiction: Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman! - I'm not sure how I'd managed to avoid reading it this long given that I already really liked Feynman and had read and watched a lot of his stuff already. It's a great book and I proceeded to inflict it on quite a few other people.
Fiction: Of Mice and Men - A tiny little book that fits in masses of content and atmosphere.
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#113Work
Where wizards stayed up late - Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner: The beginning of the internet. Plenty of history and lessons
Fun The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins. Young adult fiction that reads fast but makes you think.
Life Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough - Lori Gottlieb: Amusing book, easy read and aimed at women, but has some good insights on why we fail to get married before it's too late.
I love that I was able to scroll through pages on Amazon to check (most of) the books I read this year.
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#114I must say The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell
http://artofgamedesign.com/bio/
If you think this talk http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Bo...
is good you should really read the book. Great stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#115"The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Take time to walk slowly and think deeply. Walk slow enough to forget that you're actually walking.
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire Culture series is of like caliber. I just finished Surface Detail in a little over a day, wall clock time. Having just finished The Player of Games , I think you might really like Surface Detail .
I've read all of his novels and must say I am an Ian M Banks addict. I've read some of his fiction as well which he publishes under Ian Banks. My favorite is The Use of Weapons. I liked Surface Detail but I do think you should read the Culture novels in the order they were written. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
Have you read Peter Hamilton? Specifically, the Commonwealth Saga.
Banks is good, but I find his universes are to be sketchy and sometimes fairly shallow and not well-thought through (e.g. the one in the Algebraist). Hamilton is as creative as Banks, when it comes to the concepts, but he really delivers on the depth and complexity of the story lines and the actual execution. If you haven't read him, do it. If you have, I'd be curious to hear how you compare him to Banks.
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#117Oh jeeze, I have to choose?
Nonfiction: QED, by Feynman. It made a large portion of quantum physics "click" for me intuitively and dispelled a bunch of popular notions about quantum physics that are just wrong.
Fiction: Probably the celebrated Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, for reasons others have stated over and again, or else Ass Goblins of Auschwitz for letting me explore an author's deliciously disturbing mind.
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#118"Financier" by T.Dreiser and "Martin Eden" by J.London.
Some of the best books you'll ever read about character development. Definitely read the latter one if you're in your early 20-ies.
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#119"Innovation & Entrepreneurship" by Peter F. Drucker. A book from 1985 that makes many books discussed here on Hacker News seem obsolete ("Four steps to the epiphany", etc.). Drucker discusses 7 sources for finding the right idea, entrepreneurial management and startup strategies. I was really suprised how good this book was: Very insightful and fun to read. Price was 1,93 an Amazon Germany. Bottom line: the best book…
I second this and have a fun little story to add.
In 2008 I was on vacation in Costa Rica with my girlfriend and was actually reading this book. Two days before we went back to New York we checked in at a nice hotel in San José.
The first evening we met a really nice older Texan couple and had a few drinks with them.
The man was an engineer and had built a nice business around drilling for oil with some special explosives. Apparently no other companies did this and he was selling this technology to the rest of the world.
Then the day we were leaving I was in the airport reading the book and waiting for the plane. And lo and behold in the book Ducker referenced a company in Texas who had found a niche in the oil market.
I never found out if that was in fact the same guy since I never got his contact details. But I assume it was him.
Had I only read those pages a few days before!
Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
#120_Do More Faster_ by Techstars founders Brad Feld and David Cohen (Apologies to OP's request for brevity; there's just a lot of good stuff that I'd like to share.) A must read for anyone here who is serious about their startup. I read it on the flight to Startup School to "get in the mood". I couldn't put it down. It's easy to read for 2 reasons: every chapter is a short essay by a different person (including many Tec…
I sense a decent money generator for the startup fund in this idea (not that they need it). This would be invaluable and highly desired advice and I'm going to look into getting a copy of the TechStars book.