Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

#11

Post by oumua_don17 » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Fail_at_Almost_Everythi...

Re: Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

#12

Post by slipwalker » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

Programming Perl, 1st Ed. from Larry Wall. The three great virtues of a programmer were enlightening for a fresh-outta-college beginner.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

#13

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

"The C Programming Language", by Kernighan and Ritchie.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

#14

Post by schmudde » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

"The Annotated Turing" - I didn't know you could meaningfully intertwine biography and technical analysis like that.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

#15

Post by NishanStepak » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

oumua_don17 wrote: post #11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Fail_at_Almost_Everythi...

Sounds about right. It is called failing forward. Fail forwards, fail fast and keep going.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

#16

Post by jfil » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 12:00 AM UTC

eb0la wrote: post #3

Data Smart, by John Foreman. Out of print, but you can get it from Abe Books: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/data-smart-using-... Why it is cool? Because instead of R, Gadoop, Spark, Python, whatever... it started explaining data science with excel. The best part for me was optimization.

I loved that book!

Re: Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

#17

Post by mikewarot » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 3:47 AM UTC

To answer the question as I misread it:

  What's the most career altering *course of action* you've gone through?

I was an IT guy, and I took a job making gears in a job shop. The pay and commute were horrible, but it was immensely satisfying. Some of the gears I helped make will still be in service in a century.