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Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

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Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#261

Post by edge17 »

kgarten wrote: post #195

Not really my field of study, just on a hobbyist level I got into nonlinear dynamics. All started with Steven Strogatz' book sync. https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/sync-the-emerging-scien... I then found the amazing intro course on Complexityexplorer: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/136-nonlinear-dyn... by Liz Bradley. Since then I am hooked :)

Why specifically nonlinear dynamics rather than starting with just dynamical systems? Curious because, in my expereince when studying control theory, nonlinear controls is usually one of the courses that is taken later in the sequence after a lot of linear control techniques.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#262

Post by yourdeadneopet »

wink wrote: post #211
yourdeadneopet wrote: post #204

The Phoenix Project is a fiction novel about an IT department for a large car company that experiences management dysfunction and battles frequent technical debt, but ultimately overcomes it by adopting the best practices of DevOps. I first read its non-fiction companion book, the DevOps Handbook, which got me drinking the Kool-Aid, but this is also a wonderful, breezy read (no small feat for such a technical topic)…

I am a little torn on The Phoenix Project. My first (and later) impression was that it was in some way really cheesy and 'show by example', but in the end it's a quick read and I actually liked it. I think I wouldn't unequivocally recommend it because it could be hit or miss, so a bad choice for "one book only", but overall: yes, worth reading.

It's not the best technical book and it's definitely not the best fiction book, but I absolutely love that a hybrid of the two exists and wish there was more in the genre.

The reason I recommend it is because of how accessible it is. If I tell my friends to read a DevOps book, their eyes will glaze over a few sentences into my pitch. But when I tell them about this crazy idea for a book, they're usually interested enough to give it a shot.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#263

Post by poulpy123 »

cercatrova wrote: post #116

Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata It teaches Latin in a very cool way, where the entire book is written in Latin but it starts off with simple sentences anyone with a Romance language background can understand, before diving into deeper sentences, all while being illustrated so one can still follow the plot if they're stuck. It contrasts with very dense Latin books that focus on grammar and spelling, which often bore s…

I've heard about this book, but does it really work even just for reading ? And is there an companion audio ?

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#265

Post by jeffreyrogers »

Jtsummers wrote: post #165
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This book is awesome. I wish they made something similar for other languages (actually French has a video series, French in Action, that is similar but not quite as effective as LLPSI).

Search for “nature method “. There are a few books in this style for various languages.

Thank you, had no idea this existed. Here is a link with a list that someone compiled https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books..... The French link is broken but the others that I tried work.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#266

Post by nescioquid »

armoredkitten wrote: post #254
wink wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually thought of GEB and did a search over all comments because I thought it might be mentioned. I'd love to hear a non-programmer/non-mathematician's take on it because I kinda didn't like it at all. I found it very elaborate and slow-developing with no real insight (maybe because the concepts weren't new or maybe because I'm more someone who prefers reading an encyclopaedia over watching a historically correct…

Non-mathematician here (psychologist now doing work in data science & machine learning). I was told this book had interesting insights about AI, consciousness, and the like. But I read it last year and found it the most tedious, absolutely unfocused book I've ever read. Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person, a polymath. He clearly loves wordplay and classical music. But his ramblings are so often tangential and se…

> Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person...but his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed...

When you consider how much worth-while reading remains for each of us and how little time we have, I've come to think such prolix authors have bad manners of the self-indulgent kind.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#267

Post by nemo1618 »

ipnon wrote: post #83

PiHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin is on its face a book about love and chemistry. Taken together it becomes more of a treatise on how psychopharmacology is a method of personal and sociological analysis. Drug use becomes a psychological tool to manifest the phenomena of the mind that are normally hidden, and novel synthesis becomes a tool to then access the areas of the mind unexplored throughout history. Aside of…

I really enjoyed the book, particularly Ann's trip reports, but fair warning: it contains a lot more love triangle drama and, uh, old people sex, than I was expecting. Also, I wish I could buy just the first half of the book -- I don't want to end up on a watchlist!

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#268

Post by Jtsummers »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #265
Jtsummers wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search for “nature method “. There are a few books in this style for various languages.

Thank you, had no idea this existed. Here is a link with a list that someone compiled https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books.... . The French link is broken but the others that I tried work.

Sorry, I was on mobile and wasn't in a good spot to find any links.

https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio...

That has a functioning link for the same content as the nina.coffee page tries to link to. There are several more French texts, as well as English, Italian, Spanish, and German.

There's an Icelandic text which isn't totally in Icelandic but, IIRC, is in the same vein as these. PDFs of it can also be found online pretty easily. I have not explored any languages beyond these as the two languages I'm interested in learning/practicing are Italian and Spanish, this content was sufficient for me.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#269

Post by cercatrova »

poulpy123 wrote: post #263
cercatrova wrote: post #116

Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata It teaches Latin in a very cool way, where the entire book is written in Latin but it starts off with simple sentences anyone with a Romance language background can understand, before diving into deeper sentences, all while being illustrated so one can still follow the plot if they're stuck. It contrasts with very dense Latin books that focus on grammar and spelling, which often bore s…

I've heard about this book, but does it really work even just for reading ? And is there an companion audio ?

It does work, at least in my case. There is a companion audio as well indeed: https://hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illustrat...

I recommend the classical pronunciation by Ørberg himself.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#270

Post by zwayhowder »

georgeecollins wrote: post #260
zwayhowder wrote: post #167

Not my fields but. The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg for economics. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman for design in any aspect. Closer to my field of organisational performance/psychology. The Fearless Organisation by Amy C Edmondson.

Thumbs up Design of Everyday Things! I had a class with Donald Norman when I was in college because he was the head of my department. I thought I was going to go into research at that time because I worked in a lab. Later when I was a video game designer I realized that was probably the most useful class I ever took.

I have never held a design job, but I think his teaching has made me a much better human whenever I am making a decision in the workplace. I look for the affordances in anything we are doing.
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