31–40 of 171 posts
Fractals Everywhere, Michael F. Barnsley. I love the way it starts: >Fractal geometry will make you see everything differently. There is a danger in reading further. You risk the loss of your childhood vision of clouds, forests, flowers, galaxies, leaves, feathers, rocks, mountains, torrents of water, carpet, bricks, and much else besides. Never again will your interpretation of these things be quite the same.
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/
I always found that SQL is better for data extraction -- selecting and filtering approximately what I want to analyze.
But for in-depth analysis, R or Python is better. They're just much better languages with more control than SQL.
There was a horticulture textbook that showed a zoomed-out plot of land on the cover, which with its divisions and sectional diversity effectively looked something like an illustration of the inside of a CPU. It wasn't intentional as far as I know, but I have to admit that stuck in my head ever since as a really eye-opening metaphor. And the contents of the book were really new to me and even more eye-opening. Wish I…
Easily one of the most interesting and engaging textbooks I've read in my entire life. I remember barely doing any work for my day job while I powered through this book for a couple weeks.
Also, another +1 to Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces [2], which was mentioned in this thread. I read this one cover to cover.
Lastly, Statistical Rethinking [3] really did change the way I think about statistics.
[0] https://www.nand2tetris.org/
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-second-Pri...
Not so much a textbook, but the class NAND to Tetris really opened my eyes as to how computers and OSes work. Demystifying all that was really helpful for my programming
Fractals Everywhere, Michael F. Barnsley. I love the way it starts: >Fractal geometry will make you see everything differently. There is a danger in reading further. You risk the loss of your childhood vision of clouds, forests, flowers, galaxies, leaves, feathers, rocks, mountains, torrents of water, carpet, bricks, and much else besides. Never again will your interpretation of these things be quite the same.
Is it like Chaos by James Gleick?
Not exactly eye-opening, I sort of knew most of the content, but I don't remember ever having such joy while reading a technical book. Before or since.
I read the whole thing in a holiday (it's a big book, 500 pages or more IIRC), and I am a terrible reader. I was at a place with no internet, so that surely helped a lot.
Introduces calculus using vectors from the second chapter. For me, it was a very natural and intuitive introduction to the topic.