Ask HN: Coffee Table Books | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Coffee Table Books

15 pointssamford10012 comments

I'm getting my first apartment out of school and I'm looking for some coffee table books. Ideally, they'd be heavy on the visuals and light on depth. Bonus points if the subject is computer science.

Any ideas?

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I recently borrowed Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami from our local library and it is a beautiful, inspiring book filled with jaw dropping examples.

Congratulations on your first apartment.

I had a book about proverbs for years. It can be opened up anywhere, put down any time and a great conversation starter upon finding an obscure or funny proverb.

Here's some books I would like to see on a coffee table.

1. An illustrated book of bad arguments

2. Maus by Art Spiegelman

3. Amano: The Complete Prints of Yoshitaka Amano

4. Chinese Calligraphy: 50 Characters to Inspire Peace and Calm

5. My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Gardner

6. The Illustrated Story of Art: The Great Art Movements and the Paintings that Inspired them

7. The Design of Everyday Things

How about Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe?

https://www.amazon.com/Thing-Explainer-Complicated-Stuff-Sim...

Back when I first moved out, I greatly overestimated how many people actually read coffee table books. That said, some of the Star Wars cross section books are really fun to look through.

I like "The Computer: An Illustrated History". It's out of print, but available pretty cheaply used. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1847320139/ for the original or https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Illustrated-History-Origins-... for the reprint edition.

How about any of Edward Tufte's books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, etc?

Any large format book on leisure stuff like cigars, scotch, art will do for me...

My brother bought me world maps / an atlas (perfect).

In terms of CS, being that it is tough to be an easy read / occasional skim, I would be looking for a book of EE & computing components (e.g. a page per component such as the 555 timer could be interesting)

No need to make a shopping list, let the tao guide you. Thrift stores, they'll have coffee table book in spades, and cheap, and quite likely ones that're out of print and no one else knows about.

Another option is borrowing from a library. Even cheaper than thrift stores, and as a bonus you don't need to permanently store the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Blabac-Photo-Art-Skateboarding-Photog...

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