Gödel, Escher, Bach
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Enders Game
Speaker for the Dead
A Brief History of Time
I Am a Strange Loop
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (5 or 6 book trilogy)
Dune
Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
271–280 of 529 posts
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#272Thing Explainer.
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone stole a A People's History of The United States from me at a party I hosted, and I don't mind at all. Hope they read it or gave it to someone who would.
one of the wildest first read throughs you will ever experience especially if you come from an us educational upbringing where songs about oceans being blue(o) are historical place holders stead primary sources the elucidation is immediate.. zinn's first paragraph has an excerpt from christopher columbus' log: They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for t…
"Did Christopher Columbus ever make this statement?"
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18080/did-christ...
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#274"How to read a book" should be the first book gift you ever give. It changed my life.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent-Touchstone/...
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you should add "spoiler alert"? ;)
Nah. if you haven't read GEB, your brain won't evaluate the previous statement correctly, and you won't gain any information. Neurolinguistic hacking! (it works, just ask Stephenson)(JOKE)
Yeah, right, I know, your comment was hilarious! I was adding joke to joke, but I guess I failed, someone else even downvoted my bad joke. Did my smiley make it feel snarky?
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#276I don't have any friends who haven't read it who would appreciate it, but Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg is both a highly entertaining thriller, a fascinating look at how computer security was, and is, viewed, and a highly personal story about a man trying to figure it all out. It's very funny, entirely true, and taught me a lot. Oddly, a lot of people hated the various more personal aspects of the book, as you se…
I thought I recognised the name... turns out Cliff is the guy from the Numberphile videos who loves klein bottles. He is such an enjoyment to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
Oh dear I have no idea how and why I just spent 2 hours watching videos about Klein bottles and Mobius strips. Fascinating.
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#277Letter to a Teacher by the Schoolboys of Barbiana. Beautifully written call for better education for the poor by the children who need it.
Available in PDF now too: http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/LTAT_Final.pdf
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#278Obviously "The Universal Master Key" by Franz Bardon. They might start looking at you in strange ways though... you have been warned
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#279Gift? Not quite, but I enthusiastically offer my copies of Simon Singh's books up for loan when anyone sounds vaguely interested. "The Code Book" is a great history of cryptography and "Fermat's Last Theorem" is a good history of the problem and its eventual solution.
Yes!
I actually just finished "Fermat's Last Enigma" after reading "The Code Book" 2 years ago.
He's an excellent author who begins all of his books with the premise that the lay person will be reading it. He even makes this explicit in Fermat's Last Enigma.
He gives the reader an amazing depth of knowledge by gradually building on very simple examples and explanations which still can intrigued someone with deep technical knowledge.
Coming into "Fermat's Last Enigma", I had two years of higher level math, number theory, discrete math, and linear algebra. I still learned so much about Mathematics, the progress of the field, and proofs of simple things like Pythagorean triples.
Singh is the best scientific writer, truly.
Re: Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
#280The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.
My favorite sci-fi story, I might even admit it is my favorite of all stories. I've given it as a real book but the experience really benefits from the e-reader format because, at least for me, there were many terms to look up and many sections that I wanted to notate for consideration later. It's a challenging book but a very thoughtful and rewarding read. Highly recommended.