Ask HN: My company will buy me books. What should I get? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My company will buy me books. What should I get?

8 pointszacharycohn10 comments

My boss and I recently had a 1-on-1 meeting where he told me that if I ever wanted any "training" to let him know, and he'd try to work it out. It didn't have to be directly related to my line of work (marketing/social media).

I found http://hn-books.com/ here a few days ago and I've pulled about 5 books off of there, but I'm looking for more!

The fields I'm looking into:

-Marketing/Messaging/Reading people

-Programming (specifically Perl. I have a year of a CS degree behind me, and I've worked with Perl on and off a lot on my own and looking at using it a lot more.

-Excel/databases (I just discovered Pivot Tables in excel and I'd love to learn more about them. In addition to that, learning the basics of how to set up and use simple databases)

-Data Analysis (If Excel/databases is the technical side, then also more the "soft" side. Things to look for, ways to improve your analysis skills, etc)

The books I currently have on my list are: Art of SEO, Art of Speedreading (People), Learning Perl, Word of Mouth Marketing.

- Programming Perl

- Perl Cookbook

- Mastering Regular Expressions

Thanks! When I was first learning Perl I had access to a copy of Master Regular Expressions. I'll definitely pick this one up.

In order of which books to buy, I'd go:

- Perl Cookbook (invaluable)

- Programming Perl

- Mastering Reg Ex

Perl best practices is probably the best perl book I've read. I'm working my way through higher order perl and thats a great read as well.

This is off-topic for programming, not exactly HN-fodder, but I guarantee these books will help you in your career [and are easy reading to boot]:

The Goal - by Eliyahu Goldratt

Never Eat Alone - by Keith Ferrazzi

O'Reilly Safari subscription?

My Safari Online subscription is probably the best $43 per month I spend.

My usage is usually patchy - not evenly spread out over the year, but when I do use it, I like to get a dozen books together to cover different aspects of the same problem space, and skim fast to find the specific books that work best for me.

The 10 book version doesn't work well for my MO - I found it to be too restrictive.

Does anyone have any experience with this http://www.amazon.com/Pivot-Table-Data-Crunching-Jelen/dp/07... book?

I love:

Agile Retrospectives

Coaching Agile Teams

4 Hour Work Week

Live 24 hours a Day

-

All helped me in different ways ;)

This is a good list to start with: http://astore.amazon.com/mojombo-20

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