Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?

If I have to pick just one, it would be "How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long. In short, it helped me escape the American Rat Race. Most of my life, I was middle class, but I side stepped the typical thing of running faster to stay in place. The poverty I have suffered in recent years would have been worse without the mental models it provides me.

For programming, "Game Coding Complete" by Mike McShaffry and David Graham. The book gave a very nice intro to a number of design considerations and given that McShaffry did a decent amount of game programming in the early days of programming, there are discussions of how they dealt with incredible design constraints. The book served as a good introduction to thinking about performance and size of the software that I build today. The book introduced me to concepts like how hardware could introduce unexpected performance changes. I honestly don't do much game programming at all, but it was a very nice introduction to some otherwise difficult topics. I think that even some experienced developers could get something out of that book.

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes. That book taught me to be a decent person.

Meditations is a book I come back to over and over: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.mb.txt

A series of essays and books impacted my life the most. It all started on a sunny day, when I was a structural engineering intern full of hope and a beautiful girlfriend, waiting for my code to run(blah blah iteratively determine deflections of structures with non-linear stress-strain responses blah blah), when I read: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...

I quit my job the next day.

This was the beginning of the end. Like with all drugs, there is a slippery slope. You start with marijuana, and you move onto heroin. In my case, I graduated to:

"Formal Methods of Software Design": http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/FMSD/

After that I read: https://www.amazon.com/Predicate-Calculus-Program-Semantics-...

Now in general I am quite depressed:

* I am very judgemental and look down upon most HN posts, especially the ones that praise Alan Kay, natural language programming, or view programming as a "craft" rather than a "science"; my favourite HN feature is the "hide" button

* I am disappointed with my math education, and tired of all the rabbits being pulled out of hats in my textbooks

* I wish I had enough will power and discipline to write a programming language that is nothing more than predicate calculus, but I don't

I foresee that as a result of these readings, I will die alone, sad, and depressed...oh AND penniless.

I wish I was joking.

That's a pretty huge impact.