Rating: 7.7/10. A short novel that describes life in a Soviet Gulag in the Arctic in the 1950s. The author himself spent several years in the Gulag; this is one of the first published books that revealed the inner details of the Gulag system, and controversially, it was allowed to be published in the Soviet…
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Dance Music Manual by Rick Snoman
Rating: 7.7/10. Dance Music Manual: Tools, Toys, and Techniques by Rick Snoman A textbook about music production aimed at intermediate level producers. I don’t often listen to electronic dance music, but the tools and techniques in this genre often transfer to other genres like pop as well. Compared to other genres, dance music tends to…
Learning Google AdWords and Google Analytics by Benjamin Mangold
Rating: 8.3/10. Textbook about the two tools in the Google marketing stack: Google AdWords and Google Analytics, with about half of the book devoted to each. The four types of marketing are: search, display, social and content. Despite popular belief, online ads are a huge market, making most of Google’s revenue, but requires some expertise…
The Iliad by Homer
Rating: 7.5/10. An epic poem about the Trojan War, comprised of 24 books (about 600 pages), written about 700 BC, it is the oldest piece of western and Greek literature. The Iliad as well as the Odyssey were written by Homer, supposedly a blind poet, but the poems had a long oral history before it…
Agricola and Germania by Tacitus
Rating: 7.8/10. Fairly short book containing two minor works by Tacitus, a Roman historian who lived in the first century AD. The two works, Agricola and Germania, were written around the same time but on two different topics. Agricola describes the career of the author’s father-in-law, Julius Agricola, a general who conquered Britain and served…
Learning Modern Linux by Michael Hausenblas
Rating: 8.0/10. Learning Modern Linux: A Handbook for the Cloud Native Practitioner by Michael Hausenblas Book about various parts of Linux systems, the kernel and its ecosystem. Even though I’ve used Linux for my development work for many years, a lot of this book was new to me, covering topics that most developers have interacted…
Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell
Rating: 7.2/10. Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition by Steve McConnell A fairly large book (about 850 pages) about “software construction”, essentially the process of writing code. The book is basically a long list of recommendations on how to write code that is correct and readable, kind of like a style…
Deep Reinforcement Learning by Aske Plaat
Rating: 9.0/10. Overall, great textbook about reinforcement learning using deep neural networks, I liked it because it places roughly equal emphasis on theory and code, there are some equations, but the author explains everything more through intuition rather than formal mathematics, making it easy to understand quickly compared to other textbooks. Many of the algorithms…
Software Engineering at Google by Winters, Manshreck, and Wright
Rating: 7.6/10. Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time, Curated by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright Book about software engineering practices and processes relevant for large tech companies like Google. As an organization increases in scale (size of codebase and amount of time it needs to function), its priorities become…
An Introduction to Law and Legal Reasoning by Steven J. Burton
Rating: 8.1/10. Book that describes at a high level how the law works, suitable for laymen or beginning law students. The purpose of legal system is to settle disputes that arise in a complex society in a fair and peaceful way. There are competing views on how deterministic are the judgments made by the legal…
Fortress Besieged (围城) by Qian Zhongshu
Rating: 8.0/10. A classic Chinese novel of the 20th century, set in 1937, a period of chaos and disorder in Chinese history when it was being invaded by the Japanese. The main character, Fang Hongjian, is a student who studied in Europe for a few years but drifted around without earning a degree and ended…
Essentials of Supply Chain Management by Michael Hugos
Rating: 7.2/10. An overview of things to consider when designing and managing a supply chain. A supply chain consists of many players: factories make the product, distributors take bulk from factories and deliver packages of related goods to retailers, who sell small quantities to the public. Each player needs to think about production, holding inventory,…