Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?

This one covering the discovery of the "dirty pipe" vulnerability: https://dirtypipe.cm4all.com/

I have two questions for people who worked through this book:

1. What was your mathematical knowledge when you read this book?

2. What did you gain from working through this book?

Yes thank you

So many of these comments are recommending dry prose, Julia’s writing is fun and sympathetic about how hard all this junk is

I’ve found myself writing technical stuff in her voice a lot these days and I think it’s made my documentation more accessible

Anything by Rachel Carson.

Anything by Donald Knuth. He even teaches good writing in Mathematical Writing.

I always thought IBM held a high standard for their writing. So anything from the IBM System/370 Principles of Operation to their IBM Journal of Research and Development would be good.

Lately, I've been reading Algorithms by Dasgupta, et al and those boys can write.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold is an excellent work that very clearly guides the reader through the components and steps that lead to the sophisticated computer systems we have nowadays. Each step is explained with no logical leaps and could be followed by a young child.

Improving almost anything by George Box blew my mind. As children and even as university students we have been lied to. We have been told that experiments must be carried out one at a time to assign effects. This is patently false. In fact, we miss out on potential interaction effects (think temperature and time in cooking) by using one factor at a time experimentation. In this book he discusses many now old but fundamental techniques by which large improvements in models can be gained with minimal data. It has helped me in my career immensely and made me aware of many usual methods and fields of study.