Not a technical book but A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster had a few perspectives I’d never considered.
Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
21–30 of 270 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#22For compiler theory, "Principles of Program Analysis" (by Nielson, Nielson, Hankin).
It is so foundational to what we do at rev.ng, that we gift a physical copy of the book to every interviewee, even if they don't pass.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#23Getting Real, Jason Fried.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#24Physics: Feynman's lectures on physics. Maths: Rudin's Real and Complex analysis. Software engineering: The Mythical Man-Month. Computer science: Knuth's TAOCP.
> Maths: Rudin's Real and Complex analysis.
Yes!! Rudin kills it, but you need a year or two to get through this gem. A course in university will go too fast for sure.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#25The Jazz Theory book - Mark Levine High Performance Browser Networking - edit: Ilya Grigorik Effortless Mastery - Kenny werner
High Performance Browser Networking (https://hpbn.co) is a fantastic book. It was written by Ilya Grigorik though.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#26The Jazz Theory book - Mark Levine High Performance Browser Networking - edit: Ilya Grigorik Effortless Mastery - Kenny werner
High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik you mean.
+1 for the recommendation. I always found it hard to learn about networking from the traditional textbooks and this answered a lot of the questions that I always wondered about.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#27Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister. No longer doing consulting, but found it invaluable as a tech person building a consulting team and trying to break into enterprise. Probably useful for any professional consulting through a firm (lawyers, accountants, big 4, etc.) Someone mentioned Designing Data Intensive Applications which I’m partial to as well.
Leading Firms, David C. Kuhlman.
I read this one during a period of 4 years when I saw myself neck deep into consulting services managing both development projects and implementations. The book was so much aligned to the reality of things in the field that I started to check mark paragraphs so I could be counting them later.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#28Signals and Systems by Oppenheim, Willsky and Nawab is a foundational text.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#29Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822339
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#30("Data and Reality")[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1753248.Data_and_Reality] - despite its age (written before SQL was mainstream) it remains a short, accessible read that lays out how to think about modeling an information schema, particularly where the same piece of information may be used in separate parts of the organisation.