Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 365 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

#141

Post by koonsolo »

pengaru wrote: post #89
lbacaj wrote: post #30

The best two books for engineers are 1) “How to win friends and influence people” 2) “Never split the difference” The first one will teach you how to work with people. The second will teach you how to negotiate salaries, raises, and promotions among other things. I don’t recommend many technical books because engineers can find all of that on the internet and are much more at risk of being bad at people stuff.

> 1) “How to win friends and influence people” The folks I know who have this on their bookshelf tend to be dishonest, manipulative, self-centered pricks.

I think the main message of the book is to "put yourself in the shoes of others". And that definitely does not create dishonest, manipulative, self-centered pricks.

In fact, that teaches people empathy.

Re: Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

#142

Post by olalonde »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #133

I decided to learn/understand why Religion is the center-stage for almost every event that happens to humanity. This year, I’m planning to read the books, at least, of the top 5 religions of the world. Read Bhagavad Gita[1], had read the Bible[2] in hotel stays but will read it again, and the Quran[3] is waiting in the book-shelf. No, not religious at all; in fact, very far from it. Some time back, someone did a nice…

As a non-religious myself, I can't understand how you found the willpower to read the Bible and even want to read it again. I tried reading some chapters and was either bored to death or couldn't understand the text because of how badly it is translated/written.

Re: Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

#145

Post by jldugger »

benjaminsuch wrote: post #102

Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince

Man, this is a book that really needs to be paired with an explainer, or you will miss the subtext and come across the exact opposite conclusions: The Prince is a _satire_, a gift to the Medici family that arrested, tortured and exiled him. Everything it praises should be avoided, especially the hypocrisy and corruption of Italy. It dwells on the virtue of a guy who was appointed to lead the papal armies after his dad(!) was elected Pope. It should be obvious its not a straight book by the time you get to the part where it recommends nobles arm the populace, but we see countless "Machiavelli for the boardroom" books that didn't quite pick that up.

It was published posthumously, but was banned by the Church. Ostensibly because it recommended nobles behave awfully while pretending to be pious, but more likely because it pointed out the church was corrupt and its patrons more so.

Re: Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

#147

Post by mtrimpe »

The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile [1]

It's one of the biggest longitudinal qualitative studies on work life and company succes. It has given me by far the most valuable insight into what really matters in building happy and effective workspace.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11721498-the-progress-pr...

Re: Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

#148

Post by Derbasti »

skripp wrote: post #136

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. Wonderfully written book on how computers work. It's even a good read for the curious non-technical reader. However, some chapters might be a bit hard for them. The first road block seem to be the chapter on logic gates, but with some help it's not that bad.

And once you've read that, continue with "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces", and "Crafting Interpreters".

CODE is great to get a sense of what a processor is and does.

Operating Systems shows how processes, file systems, and hardware abstractions make a processor useful to users.

Crafting Interpreters implements a programming language on top of that.

With these three books, you have a good overview of how a computer works.

Re: Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

#149

Post by guerrilla »

orange8 wrote: post #80
laumars wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read the Bible and frankly I wouldn’t recommend. Putting aside that the different translations can sometimes drastically change the meaning of some stories, the English Bible as a whole is harder to grok than Shakespeare. Then there are issues about how it was written by man, in the literal sense. Female testaments were left out. And some of the male testaments were only included hundreds of years after the deat…

> Then there are issues about how it was written by man, in the literal sense. Female testaments were left out. Does the gender of a books author really matter?

I think it's a valid political complaint considering the role of the book in the world but I don't think it's a valid literary complaint because men (and groups of men) write some books and women (and groups of women) write other books and neither are bad for the reason that they are written by only one gender. If the latter were true, then all books written by groups of women are also bad, which is absurd.

Re: Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?

#150

Post by shafyy »

To have or to be - Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm is a great author and in this book he looks at the difference of having (owning stuff) vs. being (enjoying experiences). He argues that too many people are focused on "having", and that our whole society and even language is built around that. For example, you would say "I have a relationship". He argues that it's a weird choice of words, since you don't own the relationship.

Post reply on HN