How about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus?
Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#62The essentials, looking at my non-CS shelves: * "Alice in Wonderland", Carroll * "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", Hofstadter * Either "His Dark Materials", Pullman; or "Illuminatus!", Shea and Wilson * "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Adams (all of its sequels are also good) * "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "Lila", Pirsig * Either "Watchmen", Moore and Gibbons; or "1984" or "Ani…
I agree with your whole list except for the fact that I have not read neither "His Dark Materials" nor "Illuminatus!", so thank you for that :)
What I want to add is that while "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is great, I found "I am a strange loop" makes a better point. I'd say that the two books from Pirsig, plus "I am a strange loop" helped me form a lot of my personal philosophy.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#63A classic that hasn't been mentioned yet is Doug Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things". My main takeaway 10 years after reading it is that a bad user experience, even one so subtle that the user doesn't notice, can usually be prevented by careful design. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...
This and The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper could go a long way to improving UI abilities, I think.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#64Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Is this serious? I'm hard put to imagine anybody who doesn't get paid to do philosophy (or at least have regular access to such a person) getting anything out of this book.
I think there's plenty useful to meditate on in the Tractatus, 6.0+ has most of the exciting stuff but it's worth working through to get there.
But at the same time I totally get what you mean.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#65Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Be wary of anybody who recommends self-help, attitude improvement, psychology, business/management, or similar genres. This is a fairly broad rejection of multiple genres. While I agree that there are bad eggs in all of those categories (some moreso than others), there also is value to be found, and wariness of someone simply for recommending a book from one of those categories sounds overly harsh and dismissive.
Not to put words in someone else's mouth, but isn't the advised wariness targeted at the recommenders rather than the genres?
I like your train of thought, but the logic that follows is one can not enjoy or recommend self-improvement books to one another lest they be lumped in with some group of undesirables .. which is silly, as there are many beneficial books in the genre.
After all, not everyone is born with a perfect understanding of social science and behavior, especially many programmers.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#67Technically not programming. TCP/IP Illustrated by W richard Stevens is a classic that explains, in great detail, how networking works.
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#68Great suggestions so far. This is really an untapped genre in science fiction. Post-Internet Literature. Examples that come most readily to mind are things like Flatland, The Machine Stops, The Last Question, Arrival, and The Three Body Problem. Perhaps some of the more obscure "recursive" and "ergodic" fictions such as House of Leaves. But I dare say the great "coding" novel has yet to be written ;)
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#69Some books I enjoyed and which could be beneficial:
- Borges' Aleph, and his essays (for example Other Inquisitions). He was fascinated about concepts programming is famous for now, he would have loved recursion
- Mann's The Wizard And The Prophet. He uses the life of two highly influential scientists (Borlaug and Vogt) as exemplars for two ways of viewing progress, one highly focused on technological progress, one being sceptical of technological progress
- Wachter-Boettcher's Technically Wrong, about implicit biases in modern technology and how that excludes or mistreats people. Some good lessons if you want to start a company and get as many customers as possible ;) Similar book with more academic stringency: Weapons Of Maths Destruction
- Roman's Writing That Works, non-fiction/memo/email advice from big advertising guys, lots of good advice on getting your point across
- Fromm's The Art Of Loving & The Sane Society, two non-fiction books from a sociologist/psychologist on how to work on your relationships (i.e., love as a movie concept doesn't exist, it's mostly very hard work and self-critique), and how society as a whole has very broken goals. Becker's The Denial Of Death (on how fear of death is a major drive in life) comes from a similar place
- Wilson's How To Teach Programming - delves deeply into the psychology of learning and how to build stable communities, it's available for free so why not
- Statistics books are always good to mend your thinking! My favorite layman's introduction is Motulsky's Intuitive Biostatistics (no formulas, plain English), for a non-practitioner Wheelan's Naked Statistics is probably better
- Seth Godin wrote lots of good business books, pick one (I liked Linchpin)
- If you haven't read them yet, get the 'classics' of software management: The Mythical Man-Month, and Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
- Cuckoo's Egg is a marvellously fun non-fiction book about a programmer tracking a hacker in the 80s, one of the first international computer crime cases, featuring tons of fun low-tech hacks
Re: Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
#70Polanyi's How to Solve It.