Rating: 7.9/10. Learning React: Modern Patterns for Developing React Apps by Alex Banks and Eve Porcello This is a good introductory book on React that starts from the basics, including JavaScript and React components, then goes on to explain the usages of many different React hooks, how they work, and in what situations they should…
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Roadside MBA by Michael Mazzeo, Paul Oyer, Scott Schaefer
Rating: 8.0/10. Roadside MBA: Back Road Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives and Small Business Owners by Michael Mazzeo, Paul Oyer, Scott Schaefer Book where a trio of economists go on several road trips around the US to examine small businesses: their business models and strategies. This book showcases a lot of variety and is grouped into…
The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship by Fairlie, Kroff, Miranda, Zolas
Rating: 7.7/10. The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship: Job Creation and Survival among US Startups by Robert W. Fairlie, Zachary Kroff, Javier Miranda, Nikolas Zolas This book presents a primary economic research on startups and entrepreneurship in the United States, not limited to tech startups but encompassing all kinds of new businesses. Many surveys have…
Cloud Native by Scholl, Swanson, Jausovec
Rating: 7.4/10. Cloud Native: Using Containers, Functions, and Data to Build Next-Generation Applications by Boris Scholl, Trent Swanson, Peter Jausovec Book about cloud design patterns, and I got bored about halfway through, mostly because it had a heavy focus on distributed systems and coordinating multiple services using cloud infrastructure, which is not very relevant to…
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
Rating: 7.8/10. Book covering multiple topics in politics, ecology, and sociology — the main argument of the book is a case against “Authoritarian High Modernism,” which essentially refers to the idea of imposing top-down control over society and using scientific and mathematical principles to enhance efficiency. This concept is most notably exemplified in the authoritarian…
Programming Typescript by Boris Cherny
Rating: 8.0/10. Programming TypeScript: Making Your JavaScript Applications Scale by Boris Cherny Book about the TypeScript language, which adds a strong typing system and a type inference engine to JavaScript. The material is fairly advanced and assumes a solid understanding of JavaScript features. It covers many advanced TypeScript features, including a rough sketch of how…
SQL Antipatterns by Bill Karwin
Rating: 7.5/10. SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming by Bill Karwin Book about different ways to misuse database schemas, intended for intermediate-level programmers, discusses various common patterns that junior programmers often employ when designing database schemas. I found the anti-patterns to be good, but the proposed solutions are often lacking; they tend to…
Trade Wars Are Class Wars by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis
Rating: 8.1/10. Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis Book by two economists and analyzes the macroeconomic situation of trade wars, primarily between the US and China, but also involving other countries. The root of these trade conflicts is…
Getting Acquired by Andrew Gazdecki
Rating: 7.6/10. Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup by Andrew Gazdecki Book written by a founder and serial entrepreneur of several SaaS startups, details his journey in the first half of the book, how he built and eventually sold Bizness Apps. In his college years, the author was already deeply involved…
Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella
Rating: 7.2/10. Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella Book about the story of Microsoft’s current CEO, Satya Nadella, and was published in 2017, approximately three years after he took the helm; it describes his values, past successes, and future visions for the company….
Career and Family by Claudia Goldin
Rating: 8.5/10. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity by Claudia Goldin Book by a Nobel Prize-winning economist about the gender pay gap and the ongoing struggle for gender equality, with a specific focus on the USA. Its central observation is that men’s and women’s earnings are roughly equal until the birth of their…
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Rating: 7.4/10. Novel of Norwegian literature, won the Nobel Prize in 1920; it tells the story of a homesteader named Isak in Northern Norway around 1850. The narrative begins with Isak settling in an untouched wilderness, far from any other settlement, where he starts building a home from scratch. Shortly after, his wife, Inger, arrives…