Ask HN: Are there any good self development/hacking books out there | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there any good self development/hacking books out there

29 pointslewi22 comments

I'm looking for any good hacking or self dev books.

Something like "Emergency" by Neil Strauss but more technical and less story. Sorta like a collection of how-to's and general knowledge stuff.

Suggestions appreciated!

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For programming, I like "The Productive Programmer"

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596519544

And for Sysadmin, it would be hard to beat "The Practice of System and Network Administration"

http://everythingsysadmin.com/

As the co-author of TPoSaNA I am flattered but for the question at hand, I'd recommend a different book. Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly is more in line with what he's looking for. http://www.tomontime.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0596007833/tomontime-20 for more info. (Of course, since I wrote this other book, I don't mind recommending it :-)

--Tom

make big changes gradually, make small changes frequently. respect that self-control is a limited resource. measure your progress.

This is a great sentence which sums up the sort of things that many self help books will drag out to 400+ pages.

I'd seriously encourage anyone who wants to improve their life to spend the time sat down with a pad scribbling out what they're happy with about their lives, what they're not happy with, what they want to change and coming up with their own plan for doing so.

For the most part anyone on this board is smart and more able to solve their own problems than a generic self help book which will generally take a couple of bits of common sense and then string them out into a whole book.

Don't get me wrong, I love books and I love reading but in the case of self help books I think more often than not they're targeted procrastination and the time would be better spent addressing the things you're not happy with.

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt

http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-lear...

Worth a look.

As more technical from Pragmatic series:

http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer

I love this book.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

eHow have a book called How To Do Just About Everything. http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Just-About-Everything-Ehow/dp/00...

Lifehacker have Upgrade Your Life. http://lifehackerbook.com/

They seem to be collections of articles from their websites.

That eHow book looks sorta cool. Thanks!

i have a copy. it's not as good as it looks.

Hacking: The art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson http://nostarch.com/hacking2.htm

Try http://www.zerotosuperhero.com

Just bought this on your recommendation, what do you think of it?

Thank you. I wrote and published the book Zero to Superhero after four years of research and self-experimentation (I thought my profile bio was disclosure enough. I guess not).

If you're not completely happy with the purchase of the book, let me know and I'll refund your money immediately.

I suppose that you know your own conversion rates well enough, but I personally am not going to click a PayPal 'buy now' button just to find out how much the book costs. In fact, not listing the price screams of scam to me.

I'm confused. The e-book costs $10, and it's prominently stated. Are you referring to something else on the site? Let me know and I'll fix it.

I couldn't find it either. I even did a "find" for "10", "ten", "dollars", and "$". Nothing showed up (other than the amazon ad).

The only way I was able to find a price was clicking the "Pay Now" button, which is what the original commenter complained about.

I just visited the site and scanned it 3 times, couldn't find the price. I'm sure it's there somewhere if you say it is, but I couldn't easily find it. Just a heads up

Thanks guys. The site is old and needs a complete overhaul.

Full disclosure: I wrote Zero to Superhero.

four steps to the epiphany

While that book is a great classic on product development, it's not strictly about hacking.

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