31–40 of 111 posts
* A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: Taught me much about myself and reinforced a healthy pattern of practicing will power.
* The End of Your World: After discovering spirituality and meditation I had lingering questions. This is a frank book on the trappings of the spiritual journey. The break-down of abiding vs. un-abiding enlightenment helped me navigate through fascinating times.
Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss I am not a fantasy fan in general, but this is my favorite story of all time. The story within a story within a story, characters, world just about perfect. Daemon - Daniel Suarez So little of the SciFi I read is memorable. This book explores SO many topics in memorable ways that I am blown away.
I don't know if it's one of my favorite books, but Daemon is really fun. Unlike a lot of scifi it doesn't shy away from getting deep into technical details. But unlike most writers he doesn't get tech concepts wrong or use jagon in awkward, non-standard ways. It's obvious that computer tech is is native to him.
The Art of electronics. Learned more from that than I did doing an EE degree at university. It gets used to this day even though I bought this copy in 1995. I have the latest edition arriving today.
I don't know. I'm doing an EE degree at the moment (second year) and AoE isn't that helpful from my view to understand the theoretical side. It'll tell me what an op-amp bandwidth is and the significance of 3dB but it won't tell me why it's that way, or go into why there is a decay at 20dB/decade. It's been more helpful on the practical side of building circuits rather than their analysis, but I don't know if that's…
Occasionally you’ll need to dig deep into it and particularly if you do RF stuff but that’s about it.
I was disappointed for about six months when I landed my first position at a defence contractor when I found out their senior analogue design engineer had a circuit crib book and most of the designs were sourced or bodged from that and then adjusted on a breadboard. I was simply amazed at how informal it was. The stuff worked, was in budget and performed well. Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed.
The signal processing and software guys did all the legwork really.
Me, I ended up writing engineer ERP systems to replace paper and then jumped into the software market.
Now I play around with things and I’ve built a lot of stuff without even firing up a calculator or thinking about the theoretical side of things. Everything has a computer in the middle with a little bit of analogue stuff around the edge which you can usually just pick out of the book.
Edit: to be clear I know Laplace, Nyquist, how to do FFT/DFT, network theorems etc but I just don’t need them most of the time.
Worth reading for the landscape descriptions alone, McCarthy transforms the American west into a hellscape of inhuman violence, savagery, and evil; and yet, it's a beautiful descent into madness.
His character of the Judge is as captivating as he is horrifying. Some choice quotes from him:
> "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
> "War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."
> "Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view."
> "The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."
> "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."
* Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo. Powerful anti-war story.
* Vagabonding, by Rolf Potts. Shaped my views on hard work and travel.
* 1984, by George Orwell. Brilliant and terrifying.
* The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. Overcoming mental pain through consciousness.
* Planetwalker, by John Francis. Inspired me to walk and put myself into things more.
* Pure enjoyment: Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons), Red Rising trilogy (Pierce Brown).
This was a book I read in my early twenties that really helped me come to terms with a religious upbringing that no longer resonated with me, as well as a spiritual void in my life that needed to be filled. Seriously life changing stuff and so easy to read. Definitely the most accessible Hesse.
I’d be curious if this book has impacted anyone else similarly and if so what they took from it. Love this thread btw
The Golden Bough, Frazer. Sublime, frustrating and intriguing. Changes your dreams, whether you immediately realise it or not.
How Things Work: The Universal Encyclopedia of Machines. My grandfather gave me this when I was 8, I still regularly leaf through the tea-coloured pages and detailed black-and-red drawings two decades later. It's a charming book, the kind of thing we have websites for nowadays.