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

Don't get distracted by the name, it's about binary mathematics. Bit twiddling at its finest.

In particular the handful of volumes that pertain to my established laboratory & field work, as well as possible aspirational efforts.

It can really pay to keep up to date.

Also, the text/content of all the standards are the work of volunteer technical people, who come to complete consensus before the well-paid journalist professionals at the nonprofit publisher send it to press.

ASTM may contain some of the most statistically documented laboratory procedures for repeatabiliy & reproducibility compared to what you normally find.

A lot of the books people have commented on have been influential in the past and do stand on their own today.

Well even though outdated ASTM standards may have limited value, one real offsetting benefit is the past experience of using them in previous years when they were current and some standards were less fully developed.

So if you think about it, the current year's publication is a snapshot, the majority of your collection from previous years is huge by comparison, and ends up proportionally more helpful on the whole, even though somewhat outdated or even obsolete.

And these books are hefty, they weigh kilos per year and cost the big bucks.

Not really worth it either unless you're really ready to dip deeply into the unique type of bureaucracy associated with these type of efforts.

But it gets much worse, you think ASTM books are boring, how about the Federal Register?

There's another ongoing publication where the bureaucracy is so thick, someone can specialize so highly at navigating it that they can more effectively win bids without any technical qualifications compared to actual practicioners, most of whom don't stand a chance on merit alone. Not for me, but if you're aiming for Uncle Sam's pocketbook you need to up your game here.

I guess there are a lot of other books which might inspire people to take some action of their own, or even build a business around. Not always ones that are intended to be inspirational either.

Some people think Buckminster Fuller was inspirational, one of my handful of books when I had a shelf is Earth, Inc.

Title sounds almost like the name of a business or something:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=l5DODQAAQBAJ&pg=PP5&source=...

Only about a half inch thick, fits on any shelf with ease, not for people that dislike big words. You have been warned.

Then for electronics it's Radiotron. Specifically RDH4:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_rcaRadiotr1954_9495850...

Not so thin, 1523 pages mainly for people that do really like equations.

If you can build projects like they have here, I guarantee you will be able to do things your peers will not.

Both published decades ago, so it's up to the reader to fill in the blanks about how we got to where we are now.

The last 10-20 years of research into the Industrial Revolution hasn’t had much impact on popular understanding. Hopefully books like the Very Short Introduction will change that.

These are a bit more practical for actually using the lenses whilst designing.

Doubly so if you're actually working on a system like that.

Nicely threads a line between too dense and too watery.