Rating: 8.2/10. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner Book about the history of recorded music from the earliest audio recordings until the present day. It begins with the famous tone tests used by Edison starting around 1915 where they placed a phonograph on stage alongside a live singer and…
Category: Topics
Machine Learning System Design Interview by Ali Aminian and Alex Xu
Rating: 6.4/10. Book about preparing for machine learning interviews, covers ~10 different problems and goes through the typical machine learning system design interview process: model architecture, data collection, training, evaluation metrics, and deployment. This book has several major weaknesses: the most obvious is the overwhelming focus on search and recommendation systems, which means most of…
Numerical Linear Algebra: An Introduction by Holger Wendland
Rating: 7.8/10. Textbook about numerical linear algebra cover many algorithms, such as solving linear systems and finding eigenvalues. This book is relatively advanced, as it rarely provides examples and focuses on detailed proofs of convergence properties of algorithms. It also has no examples of computing any algorithms or experimental results, only proofs, so it’s probably…
The Last Logging Show by Aaron Williams
Rating: 8.0/10. The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era by Aaron Williams Book written by the son of a forestry family based in Haida Gwaii, BC. The author describes the logging operation that his father manages, and in different chapters of the book, he visits various workers in the…
Discrete and Computational Geometry by Satyan L. Devadoss and Joseph O’Rourke
Rating: 7.9/10. Book about theorems and algorithms in computational and discrete geometry, which deals with many points and polygons in 2D and higher-dimensional spaces. It starts with triangulations and convex hulls and gives a brief tour of many ideas in the field of geometry and their connections to research mathematics. Overall, it takes a quick…
Airline Operations and Management by Gerald N. Cook and Bruce G. Billig
Rating: 8.5/10. Airline Operations and Management: A Management Textbook by Gerald N. Cook and Bruce G. Billig Textbook on how airlines are managed and operated, including the planning, finances, scheduling, and regulations, is fairly well-written and easily understandable for someone who has not worked in this industry before, and provides many specific details and real-life…
How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Rating: 8.0/10. How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner Book about project management: what are the differences between projects that are completed on time (like the Empire State Building), and those that experience years of delays and go…
The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about a recent expedition to explore a lost city in the jungles of Honduras. In 2015, a group of explorers and archaeologists discovered ancient ruins that were previously unknown to Europeans and had been abandoned for around 500 years; this book describes how this place was discovered, the expeditions to first study…
Technical Debt in Practice by Neil Ernst, Rick Kazman, Julien Delange
Rating: 7.1/10. Technical Debt in Practice: How to Find It and Fix It by Neil Ernst, Rick Kazman, Julien Delange Fairly short book that examines technical debt, its causes, and ways to mitigate it. It is nontechnical and does not provide much specific code, languages, tools, etc. It is written by several academics; many of…
Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias
Rating: 7.0/10. Novel that is a work of Latin American magical realism by Guatemalan author and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Miguel Ángel Asturias. It is challenging to pinpoint exactly what is happening or what the book is about. Broadly speaking, it depicts the struggles between the indigenous Maya people and the maize-growers from a…
A Ticket to the Grand Show by Neil McKinnon
Rating: 7.3/10. A Ticket to the Grand Show: Journeys Across Cultural Boundaries by Neil McKinnon A collection of travel notes from various countries that the author visited, mostly in the 80s-90s, and reflections on how cultures differ in ways that are non-obvious. Through numerous examples, both Canadians and other cultures perceive surprising differences, and being…
The Shopify Story by Larry MacDonald
Rating: 7.3/10. The Shopify Story: How a Startup Rocketed to E-commerce Giant by Empowering Millions of Entrepreneurs by Larry MacDonald Book that tells the history of Shopify, from a humble online snowboard store to one of the largest e-commerce companies and the largest tech company based in Canada. It is meticulously researched, offering extensive details…