Fundamentals of Photonics by Saleh and Teich
Not really my area of expertise anymore, but it's a great textbook on Photonics (Physics of Light).
Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
241–250 of 281 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#242On Food and Cooking, The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee
Very curious to see a book on food show up here. What did you like about the book and did it change the way you think about food or life?
It very comprehensive, having a section on every category of food (Dairy, eggs, meat, edible plants, fruit, etc.), the chemistry involved in cooking or preparing said foodstuff, tables of information.
There is a lot of lore behind cooking, people don't always know why they do particular steps in a recipe, that's just how they were taught. It's nice to break down the fundamentals and tweak recipes with that better understanding.
For example, understanding what an emulsion is you can have a better understanding on why hollandaise sauce or mayonnaise breaks, also what acids one can replace when you don't have what a recipe calls for.
Cooking is a practice that I do several times a day, knowing the chemistry behind what I'm doing allows me more flexibility in the tools I use and the process I take.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#243Professional Goldsmithing by Alan Revere
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#244In machine learning, hands down these are some of the best related textbooks: - [0] Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics) and also: - [1] The Elements of Statistical Learning - [2] Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Barto and Sutton - [3] The Deep Learning by Aaron Courville, Ian Goodfellow, and Yoshua Bengio - [4] Neural Network Methods for Natural Language Processing…
>[5] Introduction to Linear Algebra by Strang People seem to love this textbook - and understandably so because it's very approachable. But I really struggled with how informal the tone was, and how friendly it was. Perhaps I'd grown too accustomed to the typical theorem -> proof -> example -> problem set format.
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Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#245Software Foundations [1]. Hands down one of the top programming textbooks to date. [1] https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/
A word of caution: This textbook can get pretty bogged down sometimes because it serves double-duty as a Coq tutorial. (It has to, because the book is literally a Coq script, using formal theorems w/ proofs as examples and formal theorems w/o proofs as exercises.) In my opinion, the material doesn't really take off until vol 2. However, I don't want to disparage the tutorial nature too much, because learning to "thin…
> However, I don't want to disparage the tutorial nature too much, because learning to "think in Coq" has dramatically changed the way I reason about even traditional pencil and paper proofs, for the better.
That sounds intriguing, but I wonder if being more rigorous also means being much slower in completing proofs and if practicality is lost (?)
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've recently replaced Hartley/Zisserman (which was getting a bit long in the tooth) with: Photogrammetric Computer Vision: Statistics, Geometry, Orientation and Reconstruction by Wrobel and Förstner.
Thanks for the recommendation, ordered. Hartley is very valuable to know how we got to where we are, from hand tuned features and RANSAC to more modern full photometric optimization and ML. It answers a lot of "why don't we just... " type questions while still providing the foundations.
Wrobel and Förstner is definitely a different style, to some degrees the two books complement each other. But it focuses much more on the stats side and gaining an intuitive understanding, which to me is really important, and if I wanted RANSAC the algorithms in Hartley are out of date anyways.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#247Graph Theory: Introduction to Graph Theory by Douglas West. If you're taking a first course in graph theory, this is where you should start. There is more than enough material here for 3 semesters, and, should you finish it all, you will certainly know more than the average grad student. The only disadvantage of this book is that it's getting old. I've asked Doug when there was a new edition coming out and not gotten…
No love for Bondy & Murty?
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very curious to see a book on food show up here. What did you like about the book and did it change the way you think about food or life?
I'd also recommend The science of good cooking by Guy Crosby. I found it to be a more enjoyable read than McGee's. Not as technical which was a boon for me since as a home cook there's a lot more information that can be readily skipped. For learning to cook: The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America is a great book to learn from. All the recipes will need to be scaled down for home usage which is a b…
Chocolate: Frederic Bau's Cooking with Chocolate: Essential Recipes and Techniques
https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Chocolate-Essential-Recipes-T...
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#249Can anyone recommend a book that you would use as the guide for building a new software project from scratch? Like something that would provide good overall structural approach and best practices. The goal would be to end with as least amount of tech debt and codebase flexible enough to stand the test of time?
In my opinion no book will really teach you this, only experience. It requires going through cycles of design, implementation and subsequent evaluation of how well those fared and how to improve upon them. After repeatedly going through this experience in a mindful manner you will develop a gut feel for what's good and what's suspect.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
#250Putting my mostly-retired audio engineer hat back on for a minute... The Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reinforcement-Handbook-Gary-Dav... This is basically the soundman's bible. Sold for an aspiring live sound engineer, has much more than just advice for live sound guys - covering everything from microphones to acoustics to basic electronics to handy rules of thumb to MIDI, all writ…
Does it touch on mixing / mastering at all? I have a suspicion that some of my friends will be looking to me to put together some demos in the near future, so I'd be very interested in some beginner/intermediate knowledge around that.
Check out the Mixing Engineer's Handbook by Bobby Owsinski. This has been my de-facto go to for everything from acoustics, studio construction, mixing, mastering and more. Great read, and a wonderful reference to have at your desk.