Dan's Thread on Interesting Books

November 3, 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

• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - amazon | goodreads
  • "hows how to build a programmable computer starting with a basic electrical circuit with one light and reads like a thriller. It's fundamentally a book about the nature of abstraction in computer science." - Michal Czaplinski
  • "Ok so far this is really, really good. I aspire to write like Charles." - Dan
• Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom - amazon | goodreads
  Bob has written another very interesting book Crafting Interpreters. He also has a blog that I really love. I've actually recently retweeted one of his articles What Color is Your Function? 💜 fan girl mode
• Elements of the Theory of Computation by Harry Lewis and Christos H. Papadimitriou - amazon | goodreads
  Papadimitriou wrote one of the best math texts in Combinatorial Optimization.
• Building Git by James Coglan - goodreads
  There was a talk on Git from JSConfBP this year that brought up some interests looking into Git internals.
• Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi and Chromatic - amazon | goodreads
• The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky - amazon | goodreads
• Learn You A Haskell For Great Good by Miran Lipovača - read online
  "That book was hilarious for me." (tweet)
• Haskell School of Music by Paul Hudak and Donya Quick - amazon | goodreads
• Learn Type-Driven Development by Yawar Amin and Kamon Ayeva - amazon | goodreads
  One of the authors once helped me on one of my problems around Flow. Later on I learned that the gradually typed system is more interesting than just semicolon number string object so I wanted to read more about this.

Likely a lot of math

• A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics by Jeremy Kun - amazon | goodreads
• Category Theory for Programmers by Barsotosz - goodreads

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.

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers - amazon | goodreads
  I like how this book has a practical perspective on how to gracefully work with legacy code.
• Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming by Professor Frisby
  Very sensible intro to functional programming. The author also has an egghead.io course that's even more sensible and fun.
• You Don't Know JS by Kyle Simpson
• Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce - amazon | goodreads
  I'm not sure about the CS part but there should be more approcheable work on the set theory part.

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.