Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts
Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
41–50 of 171 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#42Fractals 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.
Not a textbook, but John Gleick's The theory of Chaos is a great read on chaos theory - very approchable!
That was a fun read. But it was written at the height of interest in chaos theory and so some of the curious things it talked about, like the Feigenbaum constants, went nowhere
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a textbook, but John Gleick's The theory of Chaos is a great read on chaos theory - very approchable!
That was a fun read. But it was written at the height of interest in chaos theory and so some of the curious things it talked about, like the Feigenbaum constants, went nowhere
Interesting! I'll look into that. I'm about 1/3 into The Information, from the same author - also a good read for anyone interested!
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#44Non-linear dynamics and chaos by Strogatz https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/nonlinear-dynamics-and-... I literally read it cover to cover like a novel
Fascinating that there are so many chaos theory texts in this thread.
It seems like this subject lends itself to good textbooks.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#45Code, by Petzold. 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.
Same. I read almost half the book in one sitting when I initially picked it up, couldn't put it down.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#46Gilbert Strang's "Introduction to Linear Algebra" made it all click for me. I read it at the beginning of PhD studies and in a few weeks it all made more sense than during all of my Master's studies before.
Coincidentally to this question, he will live stream his final lecture on Monday: https://grinfeld.org/strang/
I was amazed reading that, as I wasn't aware he even lectured anymore. And after googling a bit and finding out he is already 88 years old, I was even more amazed. What an amazing human being, probably many thousands of people in the sciences and engineering owe quite a bit to his life's work.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#47The books that taught me computer science - Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ) - Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann ( https://dataintensive.net ) - Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom ( http://craftinginterpreters.com )
Second on Martin Kleppman’s book - really good. I have it on my nightstand as type.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#48Euclid's Elements. I was gifted at most everything language-related in school, but I was complete dogshit at math. Studying Euclid changed my entire perspective. I don't think I'd have had the self-belief to do programming without having read it.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#49How to Design Programs: https://htdp.org/
I already had a strong programming background in Java, C, JavaScript and PHP. I thought an introductory programming class at the Master’s level would be a waste of time. Going through rigorous program design in Racket was a mind expanding experience. I was amazed how much programming we did before reaching the assignment statement (set!) otherwise the first thing taught in typical introductory programming courses.
The format of the class was a big part of the experience though: all assignments pair programmed and then presented to a panel by a randomly chosen member of the pair.
A close second would be PLAI: https://www.plai.org/. As experienced through the Brown University online version of the Design and Implementation of Programming Languages: https://cs.brown.edu/courses/info/csci1730/
It gave me a very thorough and engaging grounding in the various programming language idioms and constructs and how they actually work.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#50A Russian Course by Alexander Lipson.
I doubt it is a very effective way to learn the language (though the bizarre vocabulary it teaches has stuck with me), but it is extremely entertaining.
Lessons take the form of cartoon interpretations of ludicrous government reports (evaluating Comrade Borodin's management of the zoopark), academic studies (the surprising link between stealing pencils at work and smoking on the trolleybus), and propaganda literature.
I believe there were cassette tapes that accompanied it originally, though I've never found them anywhere.