Rating: 9.2/10. Tax by Design: The Mirrless Review by Institute for Fiscal Studies Book about the issues that arise in designing tax systems, and a framework to reason about tax design, with a focus on the UK’s system. Over the last 30 years, there has been a disproportionately large increase in the incomes of the…
Category: Textbooks
Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Rating: 8.2/10. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz Book about how to use data to make decisions in startups. Every metric you collect should be useful information in making a decision, so avoid collecting vanity metrics like the number of page views or sign-ups. It’s…
The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
Rating: 8.3/10. The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change by Tanya Reilly Book about the staff engineer role, a position in many tech companies that is separate from software engineering manager and a parallel track. A staff engineer oversees the technical direction for a project, without directly managing reports….
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…
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…
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,…
An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching by Keith Johnson
Rating: 8.0/10. Book covering a lot of research about best practices in language learning and teaching. There is a lot of implicit knowledge that’s required to effectively use a language: the obvious ones like phonology, syntax, and the lexicon, but also often-overlooked ones like pragmatic differences between languages. There is some overlap between this book…