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Dan's Thread on Interesting Books

November 03, 2019

Update Hello friends I think it makes more sense that we collectively maintain this instead of having everyone look at my personal list. Please check out this GitHub repo https://github.com/wgao19/point-us-to-a-book.


Dan tweeted this:

I like reading a lot but I haven't read many technical books. So I went ahead check out what people have to recommend, and have curated a list that I'll likely check out.

Note that this list is incomplete and it is highly subjective. Link to original thread here and of course you wanna check that out.

Technical

Likely a lot of math

Non-technical:

  • If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript by Angus Croll - amazon | goodreads
  • The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim - amazon | goodreads
    also multiple mentions
    "Its not about one programming language, but does cover concepts relevant to all programmers." (tweet)

Read

Books in that list I've read. I'll likely keep pulling those entries above down with a few lines of words of my own words.

Non-technical

Apparently I'm not very technical seeing that I've read most of the non-technical mentions on that thread 😂 To mention a few that I find interesting:

  • Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - amazon | goodreads
    Love this book. I've read most books by this author. This one is his Pulitzer winning work. The stories happened relatively in the early boom of our industry but a lot of phenomena persist today.
  • The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle - amazon | goodreads
    Fast and interesting read on how effective groups collaborate.
  • Godel, Escher, Bach (a.k.a. "GED") by Douglas Hofstadter - amazon | goodreads
    Brilliant work on three geniuses. Bach in particular is my lifetime idol (in terms of creativity, not in terms of how many kids he have). And I find this conversation very amusing:

On a side note, Dan asked for programming book. I'm not sure if those mentions above fall into this category. And if so, it should at least include these few more:

  • Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner - amazon | goodreads
    Talks about the birth of Internet.
  • The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage - amazon | goodreads
    Interesting trip to the telegraph era and observe how similar it is from our Internet era.
  • Gödel's Proof by Ernest Nagel, et al. - amazon | goodreads
    Very interesting read in math on the topics of formal logic, even has an answer to the question of artificial v.s. human intelligence. TIL GED's author is an editor & collaborator for this book.
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