48. The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman. -- Alan J. Perlis
Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#12"Getting started with Raspberry Pi" is a wonderful introduction to systems, Linux, and IOT projects. Super approachable language, but also quite complete.
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#13The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing By Steven W. Smith, Ph.D. http://www.dspguide.com/ http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm
I also enjoyed Lyon's "Understanding Digital Signal Processing" when I went from a dual CS/Physics undergrad to working as a radar engineer.
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#14For aspiring fighter pilots: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#15When I was doing Bluetooth Low Energy development for IoT devices, this book was the goto reference for both the embedded firmware and mobile app folks: https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Low-Energy-Developers-Handb...
May I also ask if you have any more books on embedded devices or IoT devices not specific to just Bluetooth. I'm worked on a research project I led last summer where I fist learned about software and hardware development for small embedded devices like microcontrollers and this year I'm working on another research project using the same technology. I feel as if I understand the technology but am not proficient with it at all. If you have any other resources let me know.
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#16For pure linguistics I'd recommend Transformational Grammar by Andrew Radford and Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
And for NLP, Dan Jurafski and James H. Martin's Speech and Language Processing is excellent, and there are great projects like spaCy, NLTK, WordNet, FrameNet, COCA. etc.
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#17http://dilbert.com/ - for the management activities of my work.
and budding climate change deniers and misogynists /s
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#18As a systems administrator with an eye toward DevOps principles, I highly recommend (the possibly cliché) The Phoenix Project by by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spaffor.
It's a novel that reads like a thriller, but is infused with IT info.
Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#19Re: Ask HN: What single book is the best intro to your field for laypeople?
#20Hands down the best book to give an intro into my field: "How to win friends & influence people" by Dale Carnegie.
(I am a startup CEO, w/ technical background. Learnt a LOT from this book. Would probably not be in the same job if I hadn't read this)
Other good books that will give an intro into tech startup management for laypeople:
-Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
-The hard thing about Hard things (Ben Horowitz)