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Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#281

Post by krigath »

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology (great!)

Dare to Lead (interesting and Powerful)

Rising Strong (Sensible)

What the most successful people do before breakfast (helpful in thinking about opportunity costs)

Why we sleep (interesting read)

Exponential organisations (Re-read after 2 years, worth it)

Prisoners of Geography (very interesting view of geopolitics, Putin, et al)

Continuous Delivery (great!)

Clean Code (must read for any serious programmer)

Built to last (picked it back after 1-2 years, cool book)

Site Reliability Engineering (didn't quite finish, but good book)

Building Microservices (fantastic book which puts everything I've done in the past year into so much more perspective)

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#282

Post by frabbit »

* The Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults (Laurie Penny) - This stretched my boundaries on thinking about feminism a bit. I thought it was an interesting collection because it managed to take a very firm line without being preachy or moralistic. I suppose I mostly agreed with it.

* Wool (Hugh Howey). I was deeply disappointed. It came highly recommended by people I trust. I saw exactly where it was going and was never once surprised.

* The Magicians (Lev Grossman). I managed the first two books and was utterly bored. It is hard to overstate how much I really disliked these books. They seemed like a smart-alec attempt to take down the genre, including what I think was a side-swiping smear of C.S.Lewis as a kiddy fiddler. Just nasty really.

* Calculus Better Explained (Kalid Azad). OK, so this was not just a book, but the video course with the book. I bought this with the intention of helping a family member get up to speed, and discovered that I really enjoyed going over it as I had forgotten a lot of AP Calculus and the models/paradigms Azad introduces are far richer than the simpler ones I had retained (slightly by rote learning). Very enjoyable.

* Seeing Like a State (James C. Scott). This is oldish (1999) but full of interesting information about failed attempts at managerial systems. Wrestling with naming conventions in an old "evolved" code-base I felt some sympathy with bureaucrats trying to impose order on local conditions.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#283

Post by bcbrown »

acheron wrote: post #160

Couple out of the box ones: Lost Languages - Andrew Robinson. Starts with the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan hieroglyphs, and "Minoan" Linear B, then goes into detail about many still undeciphered writing systems. Existing examples, what's been studied and tried, the personalities of people involved, etc. Fascinating stuff. One of the few examples of the "Isthmian script" or epi-Olmec script[0] (a precurs…

I added Lost Languages to my reading list, thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#284

Post by ruraljuror »

sharmi wrote: post #58

This year, I discovered Agatha Christie. A few years back, when I was temporarily advised bed rest for a month, my sis loaned me a collection of Hercule Poirot short stories. I was always a Sherlock Holmes fan and really enjoyed the logical detective work. Hercule Poirot felt like just like a pretentious quirky old man, making denouements based on evidence that is flimsy and tenuous at best. This year, I came across…

Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#286

Post by olegious »

ivanmaeder wrote: post #25

My highlights from this year: 1. "How to Measure Anything" (Douglas Hubbard) Presents a few simple techniques (confidence intervals, Monte Carlo simulations, regression analysis, Bayes, etc) to help with decision-making. E.g., should we build this feature or spend the same money on marketing? I put it alongside "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Daniel Kahneman), "Superforecasting" (Philip Tetlock), "The Art of Thinking Clea…

"The Master and Margarita" - I'm assuming you read this in English. I'm currently reading this in Russian, great book, but I wonder how much is lost in translation and lost in "missing context"- there are some great parts of this book that are very Russian/Soviet, did you find parts that you didn't understand? (I'm assuming you're not Russian).

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#287

Post by le_clochard »

soVeryTired wrote: post #179
madmax108 wrote: post #134

My recommendations from books I read this year: Bad Blood : Man, this book really does read like a Hollywood movie screenplay. The rise and fall of Theranos, documented through interviews with hundreds of ex-employees by the very author who came up with the first expose of Theranos. Truly shows the flaws in the "fake it before you make it" mindset and how we glorify "geniuses". Shoe Dog : Biography of the founder of…

The Three Body Problem had some flashy ideas (like controlling the CMBR, and building a computer the size of a proton), but I didn't really feel like it had much depth. It had none of the great social commentary that you often get in sci-fi, and I thought the characters were kind of two-dimensional. Overall it just didn't really do it for me.

>It had none of the great social commentary that you often get in sci-fi,

I found it great for this reason. For once I was absorbed in the fiction and not put off by excess sermonizing or social commentary.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#288

Post by qntty »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #248
jonahx wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I know what it is, I was questioning the "brooo... " comment, which seemed so tonally inappropriate and weird in what otherwise seemed like a thoughtful list.

Cos I addressed that one to the author, not the audience. It's like I imagine he's standing right in front of me and what my visceral response would be to him. From one human to another I'm sorry we're capable of putting each other through that. That book is just unyieldingly bleak in the most gripping way. And he was such a good guy right til the very end.

Most people who use bro are being at least a little ironic. It's a weird register to use for a Austrian man born in 1905. Wouldn't be a big deal except that it's literally the Holocaust. Not personally offended, just explaining why most people will probably not take it the way you mean.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#289

Post by segmondy »

Blitzscaling

Kubernetes up & Running

Brotophia

Software performance & Scalability

Performance modeling & design of computer systems

The art of capacity planning

Control Theory for Engineers

Traction

Never too late to startup

The lean startup

The mom test

Executive functions

The manager's path

Grit

Power of Habit

The new new thing

Startup - a silicon valley adventure

Deep work

-------------- The Big short

Dark Pools

Flash boys

My life as a Quant

Liar's poker

A random walk down wall street

The Finance ones surprised me, I had no idea about Wall street and the mechanics/engineering behind it. I still don't like em or trust em, but I did gain quite an amount of respect for the engineering they do.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

#290

Post by ncphillips »

matrix wrote: post #186
ncphillips wrote: post #111

Author: Nicole Forsgren Book: Accelerate I picked up this book after hearing high praises from Martin Fowler and Dan North during conference talks. Forsgren and her colleagues have been doing research into DevOps and its effects on organizational performance. This is a much more rigorous account than is usual in this space, so I believe it is a must read for everyone in software. --- Author: Gerald Weinberg Books: *…

As a counterpoint, I found "Accelerate" to be just ok. It is essentially a rehash of all the popular software and methodology best practices blog posts and articles we've all read in the last 15 years. This is disappointing because I expect a book to dig deeper and present new information. The main value is in the surveys measuring the improvements that organizations experienced from these practices.

I think I actually agree with you. That said, I would recommend it _because_ it actually has something to back it up–that's worth a lot imo.
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