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Comment by jimsojim | Hacker News Reader

Deep work by Cal Newport, great book on how to develop intense focus to be creative/get more done. Highly recommended.

Race Against The Machine - a concise and informative discussion of the impact of technology on employment, income distribution and macro economics. Highly recommended as well.

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Deep Work sure is a great book, but I would recommend people with interest in the material just to go directly to Flow by Mihály Csikszentmihalyi.

Read them one after the other, first Deep Work and then Flow. IF you are going to read both then I would recommend that order. Reading Flow first, then Deep Work doesn't have much to offer.

Those books actually re-fueled my love of programming.

Effectively Deep Work is not bringing much if you already read Flow. This is just a complete book just to tell you that you need to correctly schedule your time to have "Flow/Deep" time and try as much as possible to remove distractions (News, social media, etc.) from your life.

It is even, for a part, totally self contradictory, where he claims that journalists can switch to deep work for 10 minutes at time. Because journalists are super humans not suffering from context switch where the coders are suffering from context switch if they do that.

So, this one is not on my recommended list.

There seem to be two Flow books by the same author :

Flow: The Psychology of Happiness

Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life

Which one are you recommending?

not the GP, but start with Flow. Flow is the famous, classic one. Finding Flow is a later expansion/restatement -- it's good enough in its own right, but Flow is the lodestone

I agree with the guy who already answered. Flow is the one I read and found super interesting.

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