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…
Category: Topics
How I Built This by Guy Raz
Rating: 6.9/10. How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz Book filled with stories about startups, apparently based off a podcast. The book is pretty short and there are a lot of chapters, about 25 chapters of 10 pages each; each chapter revolves around some…
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…
Owners of the Sidewalk by Daniel M. Goldstein
Rating: 8.2/10. Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City by Daniel M. Goldstein Book by an anthropology researcher about the informal economy in Bolivia. The informal economy is characterized by the lack of formal employer employee relationships and is a widespread phenomenon throughout Latin America, but especially in Bolivia, where over…
Moonshot by Albert Bourla
Rating: 7.5/10. Moonshot: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible by Dr. Albert Bourla Book by the CEO of Pfizer on the story of how the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was made. Most of the events in this book will be familiar to anybody who has been following the news for the past three years,…
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…
The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper
Rating: 8.3/10. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper Book about the fall and decline of the Roman Empire. The decline of the Roman Empire can be analyzed from many angles: Officially, the Roman Empire was invaded by barbarians and the last emperor was in 476 AD,…
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…
Overbooked by Elizabeth Becker
Rating: 7.8/10. Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker Book by a journalist about the global tourism industry and the effects it has had on the world. Tourism started becoming popular in the 1960s and now is a major economic force shaping many countries. Since it is associated with pleasure, tourism…
Viking Age Iceland by Jesse Byock
Rating: 7.4/10. Book about the history and societal structure of medieval Iceland, particularly the period from the earliest settlement by people from Norway (~870AD) until about 1200AD. All of the arable land was quickly settled within about 60 years of the island’s first settlement, leading to lots of disputes and feuding over the land; details…
Against the Grain by James C. Scott
Rating: 7.5/10. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott Book about the neolithic revolution and how early states arose out of hunter-gatherers. The traditional narrative is that the invention of agriculture enabled the formation of larger, more complex states, and this is the first step on the road…
The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom by Stephen M. Stigler
Rating: 7.7/10. Book about the history of statistics, grouped into seven “pillars” – key ideas that unify modern statistics as a discipline. Each of the seven chapters has catchy titles: Aggregation, Information, Likelihood, Intercomparison, Regression, Design, and Residual. Many key ideas seems obvious in retrospect, but it took a surprisingly long time before anyone thought…