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Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

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Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#91
post #13

Map Projections: A Reference Manual - John P. Snyder Gravitation - Misner, Wheeler, Thorne Already mentioned: (it's a goody) Linear Representations of Finite Groups - Serre

Caveat: MTW stalled me for the longest time by omitting two points:

- Tensors (as well as exterior and symmetric powers) have very little to do with differential geometry (and a fortiori physics) as such except for motivation—go study multilinear algebra first if the fanciful pictures of egg crates don’t help. Learn the coordinate-free definition of the determinant and rederive Cramer’s rule while you’re at it.

- Nobody can satisfactorily explain what the Riemann tensor is as a whole, though you can learn to work with it and understand some of the direct summands. (“A little monster of (multi)linear algebra”, as Gromov’s refreshingly frank book[1] puts it.) This is one of the rare cases where the worse meaning of von Neumann’s oft-abused quote is in force.

If you like the geometric viewpoint proselytized in the earlier parts of MTW before it gets to GR proper, try also Modern Classical Physics by Thorne and Blandford, which is that in doorstopper form (an early version[2] is available online though not advertised).

[1] https://www.ihes.fr/~gromov/expository/34/

[2] http://www.pmaweb.caltech.edu/Courses/ph136/yr2012/

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#92

Principles of Neural Science by Kandel et al Molecular Biology of The Cell by Alberts et al Janeway’s Immunobiology Robbin’s Pathologic Basis of Disease All of these books are extraordinary in their sheer ability to organize thousands of small details into thematic narratives of how life operates. They also reveal how hard we humans try to narrate life into tidy, comprehensible themes. These books are all of an era (…

We just called Janeway “the bible” for short.

Edit: I just realised what my username is here.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#93
"Designing and Managing the Supply Chain" by Simchi-Levi. My copy is almost 20 years old but still covers all the fundamentals and most of the necessary details of how supply chains work.

"Logistics Engineering and Management" by Blanchard. The Integrated Logistics Support bible, of you go by some people. Also, the engineering and product development companion to the first book. It covers how good products are designed that can be builf, sourced, maintained and supported throughout their lifetime. Despite the title, actual logistics are not covered. A must for everyone involved in the development of non-consumer goods hardware with life times above 3 years. And also agreat resource for those consumer products. If you always wondered why defense contract are as expensive as they are and are usually signed for a couple of decades, this book gives you the theoretical basis for one part of the answer.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#94
I've been programming since I was 10, earned a C.S. degree in '96, and have been a successful generalist working as a sysadmin, programmer, network engineer, devops, open-source contributor, etc at everywhere from a small ISP in a college town where I was the only tech person to startups to companies as large as H.P. working on enterprise software. Really a bit of everything. I guess you'd call it dev-ops, but even if I were just a programmer, my curiosity about how things work would drive me to understand my tools better. And at the same time, even if I were just a sys admin, my impatience for repetitive tasks would drive me to automate my tasks.

These are the books that really helped fill out my knowledge and helped me in my day-to-day work. In no particular order:

Code by Charles Petzold. I read this around 2010 for the first time. There isn't really anything in it I didn't know, but the material is just so amazingly well presented that it helped me realize there were things I could only explain in a very hand-wavy sort of way or that I'd forgotten. Just an amazing book. I re-read it every so often. I just got the 2nd edition and look forward to reading it soon.

Higher Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus. Even though I'd mostly moved on from Perl when I read this, this book really helped me better understand C.S. concepts that I should have learned better getting my degree. This is secretly a book about Lisp for people who are allergic to parenthesis. After reading this book, I was able to back to The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer and get a lot more out of them.

All of the Stevens books, but probably UNIX Network Programming to start. I had the TCP/IP state diagram (from TCP/IP Illustrated) taped on my on cubicle wall for a decade or more.

Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl. You get what's on the tin with this one. I've used RE's to great effect throughout my career and I mostly have this book to thank for it.

Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley. A humbling book. I read it and think "that's really clever, I would not have thought of that."

These are the ones that spring to mind. I'd have to peruse my bookshelf to see if I'm missing any other obvious entries. I've used a lot of the O'Reilly books over the years too, e.g. sed and awk. I'm also intentionally leaving out text books that would be part of any C.S. degree.

As an addendum: Man pages. All of them. The Linux man pages, maybe not so much. SunOS was my introduction Unix, and I was spoiled by their quality and comprehensiveness. I recall one day discovering "man intro" and then spending a week doing nothing but reading man pages. http://software.cfht.hawaii.edu/man/solaris/Intro(1)

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#96
Engineer turned engineering leader here.

"Good Strategy / Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt - An awesome book on strategy, which explains very plainly how to construct a reasonable strategy, and see signs of bad strategy. It (among other things) dissects NVIDIA's rise in the late 2000's, and predicts (more or less) the next ten years of where the company went.

"The Effective Manager" by Mark Horstman - All the things that no one says or tells about management and communication.

"Team Topologies" by Skelton and Pais - A really good view of organizational design patterns and anti-patterns for software teams rooted in the premise of Conway's Law.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#97
Artificial Intelligence: 1787, Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason)—where else to find purer reason than in a machine; unfortunately, Kant has written in Kantian using German words, fortunately, there is a recent, great Kantian to English translation in the works of 2020, Richard Evans, Kant's Cognitive Architecture, PhD Thesis [1]

Beingness: 1954, Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (What is Called Thinking?)—perhaps the machine can become intelligent following Kant, but if it is to become wise, it will follow Heidegger.

Self-reflection: 1985, Alexandre Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles, Réflexions et témoignage sur un passé de mathématicien (Reflections and Testimony on a Mathematician's Past)—insight into one of the most powerful, clear, and precise minds to have ever lived.

Socioeconomics: 1879, Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy—if the human civilization has any chance to exist and thrive beyond the 4th millenium, it's hard to imagine the implementation of that society being very far in principles from this initial specification.

[1] https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~re14/Evans-R-2020-PhD-Thesis.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#98

Types and programming languages, Benjamin Pierce: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/ Its contents is what I consider the meta game of programming. Understanding types seems to be a real boost to think about architecture, implementation, etc.

I'm tripping on the first sentence of the blurb: > A type system is a syntactic method for enforcing levels of abstraction in programs. Why is it called a syntactic method? Because type errors are caught at compile time, by analyzing the source code?

My 2c: I think the point is that types themselves are just syntax. It's all bits at the lowest level, so there's really no such thing as a 'type' on a Turing Machine tape. It can be expressed syntactically on the tape, but that's the point.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#99
post #73

For power system operations: "Power System Stability and Control" by Prabha Kundur ( https://www.amazon.com/System-Stability-Control-Prabha-Kundu... ) It is the bible of modern power system operations, and it will become more and more important as more renewable energy comes online. Understanding the concepts presented in this book is the difference between "why haven't we hit 100% renewables yet?!" and "we need mark…

》as more renewable energy comes online. Maybe better name is "unstable" energy. Some types of renewables are stable (water dams, geothermal).

So unstable isn't actually a better name for renewable, because they are different dimensions. Battery research is underway to increase the availability of energy derived from renewable sources.

Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?

#100

the Unbanking of America - the author does a deep dive and recounts first hand experiences of lower income Americans dealing with banks. I would say this is required reading for anyone interested in Fintech/neobanks that target the lower income segment

Related: the recently released "Cloudmoney" by Brett Scott [0]. Serves as a lay-accessible and politically-neutral crash course on the modern banking system, as well as a polemic warning of the power intrinsic to centralized transaction surveillance, both from state-backed digital fiat, and the "FinTech" private sector. (The author wears his pro-cash bias on his sleeve, and does a reasonable job defending it.)

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53239405-cloudmoney

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