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Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#251
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would like to hear general information security recommendations as well.

A couple I've learned from (I've left out heavily topic-specific books like Cryptography Engineering since I assume you're asking for books about general information security): Hacking, 2nd Edition - Introduces the foundations of memory and network exploitation [Security Engineering]( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html ) - An overview of a huge array of info sec topics, from "E-policy" to nuclear command secur…

Thanks for the suggestions, folks!

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#252

Does anyone have any good recommendations for industrial electronics design? Like a PLC digital/analog input/output module, protecting industrial inputs, etc? I've searched quite a bit, but I've never found enough good advice in one blog or book.

Not my field but I bought and liked "Mechatronics" -- Mechatronics: Electronic Control Systems in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (6th Edition)

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#253
post #154

Linux: Unix and Linux System Aministrator's handbook ('the green book' or 'the purple book') Networking: 'TCPIP Illustrated' or it's unofficial follow up 'The Illustrated Network' TLS: 'Bulletproof SSL' ('the Ristic book')

I have the handbook on my desk rn, awesome read, and easy to digest

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#254
For Networking in the ISP space, for me the most helpful have been:

- Interdomain Multicast Routing: Practical Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems Solutions

- Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture

- MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies

This one's not a textbook but proved invaluable to me in learning optical networking: - New and Updated - Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical Networking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__wn9zXFiy8

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#256

Kotler's "Marketing Management" remains the most definitive text on the practice of marketing. Many people - including some on HN - mistakenly equate marketing with only advertising or, more broadly, marketing communications. In truth that's only a small portion of the discipline. https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Management-14th-Philip-Kotl...

This is it. And you're completly right - self proclaimed marketers reduce marketing to tools of one of the areas of marketing like you said : Promotion/Communication . SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Social Media Marketing... the list goes on... are just tools. They serve part of 1/4 of what marketing is broadly speaking. Now I'm not saying those shouldn't be areas of expertise - they should! But a…

Let's not forget a keen ability to subtly lie and confuse people. Very important in marketing.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#257
post #96

For you budding industrial designers; The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman Ways of Seeing - Jon Berger Principles of Form and Design - Wucius Wong Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work - Nigel Cross

Elements of Design by Gail Greet Hannah is also superlative, but much less procedural than Wong. Like other design books it's learned better when applied than read, in particular because Hannah takes after her mentor (Rowena Reed) and emphasizes a grammar for visual relationships. Reed's work on doing things at off-angles and ensuring that there always exists a dominant, subdominant and subordinate relationship in all dimensions of a work, are critical.

Despite the emphasis on terminology, there is no better book for the fundamentals of three-dee form out there, particularly since in the digital age there is a plenitude of resources for two-dee form. If you want to know why elite architects make the decisions they do for the shape of buildings beyond their function, here is a good start.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#258

Could someone suggest a good book on Geometry beyond what is taught in high school? I find co-ordinate geometry to be more algebraic than geometric and miss knowing the interesting properties of curves and shapes and bodies.

'A Vector Space Approach to Geometry' https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486404528/?coliid=I1QSA8WHK9SQJN

'Geometry: An Introduction' https://www.amazon.com/dp/4871877183/?coliid=I56AS7R6YZMW

The first one if you want a bridge to modern geometry from common university math. The second if you want to start from abstract foundations at the early-undergraduate level.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#259

Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skeina. CLRS has all the nitty-gritty but I didn't jive with it at all. Skeina won't tell you line-for-line how to balance a red-black tree, but it gets the idea across with clarity. Also, the war stories are both interesting and useful. Not the book for everyone; most important is to pick one you enjoy reading.

i.e. CLRS = Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald Rivest and Clifford Stein.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?

#260

If you want to know about how to build a simple computer, computer architecture, assembly language, assemblers, linkers, compilers, java, c, c++, how compilers are built, how compilers generate assembly language, how machine code are executed by the processor, how to implement a grep with regular expressions and much more. If you want to learn them fast, look for the books of this author[0]. I'm not affiliated with h…

> Writing Interpreters and Compilers for the Raspberry Pi Using Python, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018

> If you want to learn how to write interpreters and compilers, and at the same time learn how Python, Python bytecode, assembly language, and dynamic typing work, this is the book for you. The only prerequisites are some experience with any programming language and a computer on which you can install Python 3 (or Python 2 if you prefer). A Raspberry Pi is not required. Included in the software package for the book is an interpreter that allows you to run ARM/Raspberry Pi assembly language programs on your Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X systems.

> If you have not yet learned Python or assembly language, so much the better. You will get the added bonus of learning Python and assembly language while you learn all about interpreters and compilers.

That sounds like a pretty sweet mix of skills to learn all at once, actually!

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