Rating: 7.5/10. The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives The War Below by Ernest Scheyder Book by a journalist about the struggles between mining companies and those who oppose mining projects, mostly in the US. Lithium and a variety of other minerals, such as rare earth metals, are essential…
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Efficient Linux at the Command Line by Daniel J. Barrett
Rating: 7.4/10. Efficient Linux at the Command Line: Boost Your Command-Line Skills by Daniel J. Barrett Book on the more advanced aspects of the bash shell and bash scripting, including how child processes work with local and environment variables, different ways of executing commands with output substitution, why changing directories in a shell script doesn’t…
In the Footsteps of Du Fu by Michael Wood
Rating: 8.1/10. An introductory book to Du Fu, a poet who lived during the Tang Dynasty and is considered one of the greatest in China’s history. He was known as the ‘Poet Historian,’ with poems that chronicle many of the situations of poor people and daily life in an era full of warfare. The book…
Building Browser Extensions by Matt Frisbie
Rating: 7.7/10. Building Browser Extensions: Create Modern Extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge by Matt Frisbie Book about browser extensions, covering the basics of extensions primarily for Chrome but also for other browsers. It explores different parts of extensions and how they can interact with each other, as well as the sandbox model, various…
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
Rating: 8.1/10. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben Book about forests and trees, made up of about 30 short chapters, it was originally written in German; each chapter describes some aspects of trees and it’s written in plain and non-technical language….
Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil
Rating: 7.8/10. Book examining many aspects of life throughout history, with a focus on energy use. Energy may be considered a kind of universal currency that determines the quality of life across very different periods, from prehistoric societies to agriculture, the industrial revolution, and today. As civilization has advanced, we’ve gotten better at harnessing new…
What to Listen For in Music by Aaron Copland
Rating: 7.6/10. Book about how to appreciate classical music, especially 20th-century modern music, written by influential American classical composer Aaron Copland. It’s written at a level that does not assume much prior understanding of music, even though it makes use of some musical notation. Often, people ask how to understand music, in short, there is…
Design for Hackers by David Kadavy
Rating: 8.0/10. Book that breaks down the principles of design and explain the theoretical foundations of design aspects such as typography, composition, and color, meant for an engineer who likes to have rules to follow. The book is filled with images and graphics, making it a relatively quick read. It also provides interesting historical information…
Tim: The Official Biography of Avicii by Mans Mosesson
Rating: 7.3/10. Biography of Swedish EDM artist Avicii, real name Tim Bergling, was a relatively shy teenager, who grew up in a wealthy neighborhood in Stockholm. In high school, at the age of 16, he discovered FL Studio with some friends who were also interested in making EDM music. He became quite good at making…
Generative Deep Learning by David Foster
Rating: 8.3/10. Generative Deep Learning: Teaching Machines to Paint, Write, Compose, and Play by David Foster Book covering the fundamentals of all the major generative AI models, focusing on image generation such as VAE, GAN, diffusion models, etc. It presents relatively little math and uses Keras code to demonstrate how to train and run each…
Designing Web APIs by Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, Amir Shevat
Rating: 8.0/10. Designing Web APIs: Building APIs That Developers Love by Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, Amir Shevat A fairly short book about best practices for designing web APIs to be easy to use and maintainable, written by three engineers who worked on the Slack API integration, which has been a successful marketplace for apps. Chapter…
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr
Rating: 8.4/10. Classic science fiction novel, won the Hugo Award, written in the 1950s, portraying the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse that spans several millennia, it has three parts, the first is 600 years after present and each part is another 600 years in the future. The novel explores how humanity undergoes dark ages, a…