Rating: 7.8/10. Work of Icelandic literature that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, the novel focuses on a farmer named Bjartur and his quest for “independence,” which he defines as being free from debts and obligations to anyone else. The novel describes Bjartur’s life as a sheep farmer in the harsh Icelandic landscape,…
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High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik
Rating: 8.5/10. Book covering all aspects of networking and is useful for both front-end and back-end developers; it’s written at a level that doesn’t assume much prior networking knowledge, providing a higher-level overview of various protocols like TCP, HTTP, and WebSocket. It offers practical advice on what these protocol details imply for applications and how…
The Unicode Cookbook for Linguists by Steven Moran and Michael Cysouw
Rating: 7.5/10. Fairly short book that introduces readers to the Unicode standard and the pitfalls of encoding. It’s suitable for both programmers and linguists. It’s probably one of the shorter books on the topic that I’ve come across. However, it seems to focus more on topics of interest to linguists, and several important issues related…
Visual Studio Code for Python Programmers by April Speight
Rating: 7.0/10. Book about the VS Code IDE, catered to Python programmers. It mostly covers basic operations with detailed step-by-step instructions and screenshots. However, I found the depth somewhat lacking. Most of the functions seem like things any seasoned IDE user would know. The book doesn’t go deeply into any particular feature, like launch configurations…
Introduction to Computer and Network Security by Richard R. Brooks
Rating: 8.0/10. Chapter 1: The History of Cryptography. Attempts to encode messages date back to ancient times. However, up until WW1, many of these encoding methods weren’t very effective. Codes were frequently cracked, and various issues often rendered messages unreadable due to coordination problems between the sender and receiver. WW2 marked a significant shift; with…
System Design Interview by Alex Xu
Rating: 8.0/10. System Design Interview – An insider’s guide by Alex Xu Book written to study system design interviews, offering several case studies of systems and how the author would have designed them. It also presents common patterns often used in these large distributed systems. In each case, while the final system can become quite…
Web Security for Developers by Malcolm McDonald
Rating: 8.3/10. Web Security for Developers: Real Threats, Practical Defense by Malcolm McDonald Book about web security, for developers looking to secure their apps. It offers best practices to prevent hacks; understanding security also sheds light on how various web architecture components are crafted and motivations for their design. Chapter 1: Hacking a website can…
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rating: 8.2/10. Historical novel by a Peruvian novelist about Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic for 31 years from 1930 to 1961. The book is largely based on true historical events and includes many real historical figures, but also introduces some fictional characters and events. These never conflict with what might have actually…
Real-World Next.js by Michele Riva
Rating: 8.1/10. Real-World Next.js: Build scalable, high-performance, and modern web applications using Next.js, the React framework for production by Michele Riva Book that introduces the most important features of Next.js, and gives some examples of building applications using this framework. It assumes some familiarity with web development and React, and also discusses various other useful packages…
Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke
Rating: 8.6/10. Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd Edition: A Modern Introduction to Programming by Marijn Haverbeke A book that teaches the JavaScript programming language: the first half is about the core parts of the language itself, introducing basic control structures then more advanced topics like modules, objects, and promises. The second half is about how JS interacts…
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks by Luc Perkins
Rating: 8.4/10. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement by Luc Perkins Book exploring seven different, mostly NoSQL databases. Each database gets about 40-50 pages and is split into three days: the first day covers basic operations like setup, inserting, querying, and deleting; the second day goes into…
Modern CSS with Tailwind by Noel Rappin
Rating: 7.6/10. Modern CSS with Tailwind: Flexible Styling Without the Fuss by Noel Rappin A short book of around 80 pages, covering the basics of Tailwind CSS, a modern utility framework. Tailwind simplifies various aspects of CSS, making a book on it relatively concise. While online documentations cover this content, having it presented in book…