Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?

I don't know about _eye opening_, but The Art of PostgreSQL really changed the way I work for the better. Like a lot of people, I used to be one that would pull all my data into Python for processing, Pandas-style. Once I learned how to do it all directly in PG everything became trivial.

[0] https://theartofpostgresql.com/

Non-linear dynamics and chaos by Strogatz

https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/nonlinear-dynamics-and-...

I literally read it cover to cover like a novel

The Blind Spot: Lectures On Logic by Jean Yves-Girard

For context, Girard is a mathematical logician, philosopher, and co-discoverer of the type system System F (Haskell, ML, etc.). The book is a monograph on proof theory, and I was interested in learning more about affine and linear logic to deepen my understanding of Rust and other language ecosystems focused around the ability to explicitly model resources. However, along the way, I learned some other great things: (1) continental philosophy is deep and cool; (2) mathematical writing can be simultaneously rigorous, clear, and hilarious; and it reinforced (alongside Alain Connes's Noncommutative Geometry, and various French philosophers) (3) French academic writing is both frustratingly and delightfully idiosyncratic. Girard writes polemically about other aspects of knowledge, mathematics, etc., and there's heaps of dry humor and anecdotes throughout the book. It's a hard book to read even by pure mathematics standards--a topic not exactly known for being a brisk read--but it was worth it just for the side discoveries alone.

Not a textbook, but John Gleick's The theory of Chaos is a great read on chaos theory - very approchable!

Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation by Ken Train

https://eml.berkeley.edu/books/choice2.html