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Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

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Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#201

Post by shanusmagnus »

dxbydt wrote: post #192
kristiandupont wrote: post #81

I am going to repeat what I always say when these book threads come up: I love all the recommendations here but please say a word or two about why you recommend said books. Sell them to me, don't make me do the work. Dumb lists of titles are so uninteresting.

> why you recommend said books. > Sell them to me ok, i will try. 2 books I absolutely love and have read cover to cover several times, solved most of the 1000+ problems. 1. Inference - Rohatgi 2. Inference - Stapleton Why I recommend them ? The real answer is super long. But the short version is - there are thinkers & there are doers. Basically, the mathematical statistics world has these theory-building Bourbaki ty…

I like how you laid this out as a tension between two worldviews. I'm curious: as a seeming master of the "bag of tricks" worldview, do you feel like having fully absorbed so many "tricks" has given you a kind of empirical insight into things?

In other words: have the tricks, when crashed against the real world over and over like you describe, oozed into something akin to a larger theoretical sense of things? Or do they remain isolated tricks that you apply when they seem to match?

(I wish I could frame this question better, but I don't know this field, sadly.)

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#202

Post by coherentpony »

pc86 wrote: post #183
coherentpony wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll counter. Don't tell my why you recommend it; tell me briefly what it's about instead and I'll decide for myself whether or not I want to read it. I like to have moments to myself without feeling like I am being sold something. I feel like I am constantly being sold things on the internet; let me do the discovery myself. Let me decide for myself whether or not it is interesting to me.

If someone says why they really like a book, you can just... skip that part. If you post a list of titles with zero context, the only people you're helping are those who just want a list of titles, which is almost certainly the minority.

Of course. I don't disagree with any of that.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#203

Post by macintux »

Stamp01 wrote: post #46

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce Tate Seriously, check out this book. It's delightful! It'll level you up as a software developer. Also, I've heard it heavily influenced José Valim to create Elixir.

It changed my life: I discovered Erlang, which finally got me into FP, and took me to Basho where I got a big leg up on distributed systems and databases.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#204

Post by froh »

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald Reinertsen

its neither a manifesto (like agile) not a specific architecture (like scrum or safe or XP or kanban, etc). instead it's collecting the underlying _principles_ of collaborative software engineering flow and it's motivating why they work.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#205

Post by koeng »

“A Genetic Switch” is one of the best books in my field. The entire book is about a single genetic switch in a bacterial virus, starting off high level before going down into the nitty gritty, all for this single switch. Highly recommend for a deep dive into how genetics can actually be controlled, down to the physics level.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#208

Post by ellen364 »

ellen364 wrote: post #124

Few of these books are “great works” in their field, but all changed my understanding of their topic. - How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren. I was in academia when I read this and it had a huge impact on how I read and thought about academic papers. - Intuitive Biostatistics by Motulsky. First stats book that I enjoyed. Emphasises the practice of statistics, particularly the assumptions and mistakes people tend…

Somehow forgot the two books that had the biggest influence on me. (And forgot for so long that I can’t edit the post.)

- The Population History of England, 1541-1871, by Wrigley and Schofield.

- English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837, by Wrigley et al.

These books describe and analyse what was, for the time, an extraordinary amount of painstakingly pieced together historical data. Reading them changed my understanding of how history could be studied.

Each book is 700-800 pages, so a big commitment for anyone outside the field. But if anyone’s curious, Prof. Wrigley’s obituary has an excellent summary: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/28/sir-tony-wrigl...

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#210

Post by mellosouls »

cercatrova wrote: post #134
_qua wrote: post #120

The Selfish Gene should be read by everyone who studies biology or life science. Modern biological sciences are underlied by an understanding of evolution an genetics. I had heard variants of the phrase "change in allele frequency in a population over time," as a description of evolution many times starting in high school. But it wasn't until I read The Selfish Gene in college that I really understood what this meant…

Indeed. We are only vessels for our genes, what we do doesn't really matter as long as we pass our genes along, from the perspective of our genes. I would also recommend other Dawkins books such as The God Delusion, it was one of the pivotal books that turned me from someone vaguely religious to an atheist. It explains simply how the various fallacies of religions are explainable and unwrappable.

I enjoyed the Selfish Gene but found the God Delusion crass and superficial by comparison, a sign of an expert in one field overestimating their ability in another.
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