Rating: 8.3/10. The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects by Andrew Chen Book about the dynamics of network effects and offers guidance for founders who are building products that depend on these effects for success. The author previously worked at Uber during a phase of explosive growth where he witnessed firsthand…
All Book Reviews
Pyomo – Optimization Modeling in Python by Bynum and others
Rating: 8.2/10. Book giving an overview of the Pyomo optimization framework, which doesn’t solve optimization problems itself but allows users to formulate them in a high-level, object-oriented format. Pyomo acts as an interface with solvers like CPLEX. The book talks about into numerous features of Pyomo but mostly stays clear of the solver algorithms’ internals,…
High-Performance Web Apps with FastAPI by Malhar Lathkar
Rating: 7.6/10. Book that explores the main features of the FastAPI web framework; it’s not super in-depth but covers the main use cases and components in fair detail. Chapter 1. FastAPI offers a number of improvements over other Python frameworks. First, it has type hints that allow the IDE to detect type errors. Next is…
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
Rating: 7.8/10. Work of Icelandic literature that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, the novel focuses on a farmer named Bjartur and his quest for “independence,” which he defines as being free from debts and obligations to anyone else. The novel describes Bjartur’s life as a sheep farmer in the harsh Icelandic landscape,…
High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik
Rating: 8.5/10. Book covering all aspects of networking and is useful for both front-end and back-end developers; it’s written at a level that doesn’t assume much prior networking knowledge, providing a higher-level overview of various protocols like TCP, HTTP, and WebSocket. It offers practical advice on what these protocol details imply for applications and how…
The Effective Hiring Manager by Mark Horstman
Rating: 7.2/10. Book on hiring, from screening resumes, interviews, and offer. It mostly focuses mostly on on behavioral interviews, which are the only type that is applicable to any job, so I’m a bit disappointed because it doesn’t offer any specific details on other types of interviews or data to back up its claims, especially…
The Unicode Cookbook for Linguists by Steven Moran and Michael Cysouw
Rating: 7.5/10. Fairly short book that introduces readers to the Unicode standard and the pitfalls of encoding. It’s suitable for both programmers and linguists. It’s probably one of the shorter books on the topic that I’ve come across. However, it seems to focus more on topics of interest to linguists, and several important issues related…
Visual Studio Code for Python Programmers by April Speight
Rating: 7.0/10. Book about the VS Code IDE, catered to Python programmers. It mostly covers basic operations with detailed step-by-step instructions and screenshots. However, I found the depth somewhat lacking. Most of the functions seem like things any seasoned IDE user would know. The book doesn’t go deeply into any particular feature, like launch configurations…
Introduction to Computer and Network Security by Richard R. Brooks
Rating: 8.0/10. Chapter 1: The History of Cryptography. Attempts to encode messages date back to ancient times. However, up until WW1, many of these encoding methods weren’t very effective. Codes were frequently cracked, and various issues often rendered messages unreadable due to coordination problems between the sender and receiver. WW2 marked a significant shift; with…
The Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz
Rating: 7.8/10. The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz Book about the economic challenges faced by artists of various types, including musicians, visual artists, writers, etc. Despite often being highly educated, artists are consistently among the lowest earners in the…
System Design Interview by Alex Xu
Rating: 8.0/10. System Design Interview – An insider’s guide by Alex Xu Book written to study system design interviews, offering several case studies of systems and how the author would have designed them. It also presents common patterns often used in these large distributed systems. In each case, while the final system can become quite…
Web Security for Developers by Malcolm McDonald
Rating: 8.3/10. Web Security for Developers: Real Threats, Practical Defense by Malcolm McDonald Book about web security, for developers looking to secure their apps. It offers best practices to prevent hacks; understanding security also sheds light on how various web architecture components are crafted and motivations for their design. Chapter 1: Hacking a website can…