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Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

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Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#191

Post by marttt »

(I'm in my late 30s, but I always try to look for "time-tested" books first. Books that seem to hold their value after decades; see also: Lindy effect.)

Language and linguistics: "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

Systems thinking: "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" by Gerald M. Weinberg (1975): https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/General_Systems.html

I still often use Weinberg's Systems Triumvirate when feeling stuck on a problem:

1. Why do I see what I see?

2. Why do things stay the same?

3. Why do things change?

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#193

Post by catominor »

karambahh wrote: post #19
anyfactor wrote: post #17

Accounting... The rule of accouting is that if anything excites you about accounting you shouldn't do accounting. The most fun I had studying accounting was learning about tax evasion, money laundering, defrauding stakeholders etc. Any academic book about forensic accounting could be deemed interesting if you just read only the case studies.

What book on forensic accounting would you recommend for entertainment value? I have some knowledge of french accounting, been exposed to US style, and thoroughly enjoyed long forms involving forensic accounting, money laundering and the like...

I really enjoyed Fooling Some of the People All of the Time by David Einhorn. He goes clearly and deeply into his suspicions about Allied Capital, a company that he thought/thinks had unethical/illegal accounting and business practices.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#194

Post by sterlind »

The Algorithm Design Manual by Skeina got me hooked on algorithm design, after the CLRS book discouraged me. Skeina does a fantastic job of conveying the intuition behind how each algorithm works, so it's not a cookbook or nitpicky textbook. He also has these wonderful war stories of problems he solved, and example problems like "which telephone exchanges do you need to bomb in order to take the grid down?"

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#195

Post by kgarten »

Not really my field of study, just on a hobbyist level I got into nonlinear dynamics.

All started with Steven Strogatz' book sync. https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/sync-the-emerging-scien...

I then found the amazing intro course on Complexityexplorer:

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/136-nonlinear-dyn...

by Liz Bradley.

Since then I am hooked :)

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#196

Post by musicale »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #158

After spending more than a decade and a half in the field of software development/computer science I’ve come to realise some fields simply are not attractive to many/most people of other fields. Not at all. Hell, CS is not attractive to a lot of people working in the field. They work because it pays the bills. So no, at the risk of sounding like I’m full of myself, I’d say there’s simply ZERO such books at least for…

While not exactly books per se, magazines can be inspiring as well. Along with availability of inexpensive hardware, I suspect that electronics and computing enthusiast magazines were one of the catalysts for computing becoming a popular hobby in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although we may not currently have as many cool electronics and computing enthusiast magazines as they had back then, we do have a few of them including Make:, Linux Format, and RasPi. (Not to mention the internet and youtube, but sometimes it's hard to know where to start and where to go, and print media are good for that.)

In the area of computer music production, I rather like Computer Music; a typical issue provides music production apps and plugins that you can download and use as well as instructional articles and video explaining how to use them.

Recently I was also inspired by wizardzines.com - I think we need more books (or zines) in a fun and tutorial style!

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#198

Post by bakuninsbart »

worldmerge wrote: post #12
pxska wrote: post #4

A very tough question. I feel that it might be quite hard to lure a curious person into Computer Science, who doesn't know anything about the field yet. One of the books I liked (since I actually studied Linguistics in my Bachelor's) and what drew me towards CS was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.

I think maybe some of the history books could do it for cs. Like I'm very early into the book Crypto Anarchy, Cyber States and Pirate Utopias (2002 MIT PRESS), and it's kinda interesting. I'm not sure how the later parts are but chapter 1 is interesting. It definitely has an audience in mind but I think it could be an interesting book for someone outside of CS.

For me it was the german book "Das Chaos Computer Buch", which is basically a retelling of CCC shennanigans in the 80s. It has just the right mix of adventure, humour and technicality to get a 13 year old interested in hacking and computers.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#200

Post by mdp2021 »

Errancer wrote: post #29

I would go with "Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical" by Lakatos, its a dialog-form history of defining Euler's formula and it shows the human side of mathematics as a science. I think its great as math has this unique status as providing with undoubtable knowledge but history shows that human error is possible even in this field. Alternately "The Unreality of Time" by McTaggart, it has less than 20 pag…

> Proofs and Refutations - The Logic of Mathematical Discovery

Do not, do not miss the transcripts of the lessons held by Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics (LSE), "Lectures on Scientific Method" - available in

-- Motterlini, Matteo (ed.), For and Against Method, including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence (1999), Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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