Today in the post about mid-level backend engineering courses, someone offered "just buy this book" (Designing Data-Intensive Applications) and other commenters echoed support for the book. A few weeks ago in a thread about ML someone commented to the effect of "Everything you need to know in ML is in this book" (Deep Learning with Python) and again people chimed in supporting it. Maybe those two examples are actually off base, but I love the idea of the "one book" where you can get a decently complete picture of a given subject and level of expertise. So HN, what's your discipline and "one book"?
Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#2Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering, Henry W. Ott
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#3k&r
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#4Statistical Inference Berger and Casella.
There are better options, but the exercises and notataion are fun.
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#5Factory Physics - Hopp, Spearman
Great book on manufacturing operations management that I consider to be one of the best technical books on the subject.
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#6k&r
The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie for those who don't know
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#7Frontend dev, and the others I've met seem to just read a few pages on MDN and Stack and wing it from there, lol. I wish there was a good book on the engineering side of it. The UX side of it has a few good titles, but the dev side is pretty messy.
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#8Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Great book to understand Human evolution
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#9Frontend dev, and the others I've met seem to just read a few pages on MDN and Stack and wing it from there, lol. I wish there was a good book on the engineering side of it. The UX side of it has a few good titles, but the dev side is pretty messy.
There is: DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith.
https://www.amazon.com/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docum...
But, nobody will read it. Tree models irrationally scare the shit out of most developers. Most people would rather cut off an arm and work 10x harder for less money than navigate a tree. It’s super weird.
However, if you are a person who isn’t autistically riddled with fears you lie to yourself about understanding the DOM opens almost all doors on the frontend, such as: accessibility, SEO, A/B testing, test automation, performance, and writing durable code quickly without need for a framework.
Re: Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?
#10Frontend dev, and the others I've met seem to just read a few pages on MDN and Stack and wing it from there, lol. I wish there was a good book on the engineering side of it. The UX side of it has a few good titles, but the dev side is pretty messy.
There is: DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. https://www.amazon.com/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docum... But, nobody will read it. Tree models irrationally scare the shit out of most developers. Most people would rather cut off an arm and work 10x harder for less money than navigate a tree. It’s super weird. However, if you are a person who isn’t autistically riddled with fears you lie to yourself about understanding…
I couldn't find a preview for the 2nd edition, but the 1st edition seemed quite out of date?
The frontend work I tend to be dealing with at this point in my career usually involve proper web "apps" (dashboards, visualizations, editors, etc) rather than the web "pages" that the DOM was well suited for. The main difference is the need for client-side state and realtime interactivity that doesn't need a full backend rerender every time. Yes you can write all that in plain JS but at some level of complexity you'd just be reinventing your own framework.
What I'd like to see isn't so much getting rid of all the frameworks in favor of vanillajs (unless ecma improves it dramatically), but a good guide on how to integrate the various pieces of modern frameworks in a neat and maintainable way. I'm not sure that it's really doable right now given the pace of change and how quickly everything becomes obsolete. Clean Code has some interesting ideas but isn't exactly a drop in fit to the JS ecosystem.
Anyway, just thinking out loud...