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Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#121

Post by chiefalchemist »

pjmorris wrote: post #98

I hilariously overestimate the number of books I can get through when I make these lists, but my current list for 2020 is as follows: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution Book of Proof Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems Seeing Like a State: How Certa…

My father had a stroke a couple years ago. Read "The Brain That Changes Itself" to get a feel for what might or might not be possible. Good stuff. Had practical insights for me as well. Definitely bump it up your priority list.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#122

Post by matsemann »

douglaswlance wrote: post #73

My top priority books: Software Requirements - Karl Wiegers Programming TypeScript - Boris Cherny Associate Cloud Engineer Study - Dan Sullivan Design Patterns - Gang of Four Refactoring - Kent Beck, Martin Fowler Programming Pearls - Jon Bentley Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas, Andrew Hunt CSS: The Definitive Guide - Eric A. Meyer, Estelle Weyl…

You have quite overlap between some stuff. I would recommend "Clean Code", but then skip the rest from the same author, at least for a while. While "Code Complete" is good, it's loooong and also a lot of the same stuff.

For patterns, "Head First" is a bit childish maybe, but the content is fine for someone learning to recognize patterns. "Patterns of Enterprise..." is also good, but more dry. I'd stick with one of those two. And then skip the one by GoF, unless you want to read the "original" for some reason.

"The Pragmatic Programmer" is probably the book that has shaped my work the most.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#123

Post by cryoshon »

0kl wrote: post #42

I plan to reread a couple core works for myself. Of that list the ones that I’d recommend for others are: Aurelius (trans. Martin Hammond) Fear and Trembling Man’s Search for Meaning Tolstoy’s Confessions Kundera’s The Art of the Novel After doing a thorough reading of “How to Read a Book” I decided to try rereading a few books to pull more out of them. I can’t recommend “How to Read a Book” enough - despite its anac…

here to second "how to read a book". few books have changed the way that i interact with written information as profoundly.

it's not just about reading books, of course. it's about reading any long-form content.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#125

Post by MonkeyIsNull »

klohto wrote: post #19

I’d like to finally read something by Jason Fung. I have been trying fasting on and off for about 6 months and I can see results, but I have not bothered to check the theory behind it at all. If anybody would like to recommend some books on nutrition, body aging and general health regarding food, bring it!

He did write The Complete Guide to Fasting, which is excellent and covers all the science behind it. There is also Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle by Gin Stephens which is basically One Meal a Day, however she includes links to all the reports to everything she talks about in the book and yes, she actually read them and encourages others to do the same, not just believe what she says. There's always the fasting subreddit's wiki that has links to other info: https://www.reddit.com/r/fasting/wiki/fasting_in_a_nutshell

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#126

Post by lghh »

Leisure Stuff:

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, It's Chaotic Founding... by Sam Anderson

Midnight In Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (tried it this year and stopped, want to give it another go)

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just finished Exhalation and I think it's great)

An Ursula K. Le Guin novel, have not picked one out yet

A book related to basketball (possibly Dream Team, but IDK yet)

Less Leisure Stuff:

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

The End Of Policing by Alex S Vitale

Either Manufacturing Consent or Understanding Power by Chomsky

The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold

Work:

Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws by Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto

Finish Writing An Interpreter In Go by Thorsten Ball

If I can get through all of these, I will be very pleased. Throw in a book or two at recommendation from friends and I think I'm full for the year.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#127

Post by keiferski »

utopian3 wrote: post #117
keiferski wrote: post #64

I'm planning on going through the entire Harvard Classics. At 51 volumes, it works out pretty nicely to read one volume per week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

Those volumes seem very dense for reading, digesting, and understanding in a single week. Unless you read & learn very fast, how do you plan to do this?

They aren't too bad, really. Each volume is something like 500 pages, so roughly 70 pages per day. If you can dedicate an hour or two per weekday and three hours per weekend day, it's very doable.

And as far as a deeper understanding of the work in question, I plan to listen to podcasts or lectures during my commute or when I'm getting ready in the morning. For example, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations has a plethora of free lectures on YouTube.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#128

Post by yboris »

pjmorris wrote: post #98

I hilariously overestimate the number of books I can get through when I make these lists, but my current list for 2020 is as follows: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution Book of Proof Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems Seeing Like a State: How Certa…

Start with Guns, Germs, and Steel and/or Digital Minimalism ;)

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#129

Post by cryoshon »

nandreev wrote: post #28

The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas (A. Grigas) We (Y. Zamyatin) The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper (C. Petzold) Endurance (A. Lansing) Economics: The User's Guide (H. Chang) Oblomov (I. Goncharov)

highly recommend oblomov... there's something about it that's really entertaining even though it's impossible to describe.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#130

Post by matsemann »

bilekas wrote: post #110

Everyone else with nice collections of books. Mine : Harry Potter

Well, I still read them almost every christmas. At least a few of them.

I'd also recommend Brandon Sanderson. Mistborn series is very good, and Stormligh Archive is good so far. I really like his world-building, and I think the way he uses magic is something most HNers would approve of. It's often well defined, and the characters try to exploit it the same way a reader would.

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