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Comment by random_moonwalk | Hacker News Reader

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random_moonwalk·

Any particularly good books you can recommend that you came across on your Amazon binge?

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I can recommend Engines of Creation:

1.0 summary: http://web.mit.edu/cortiz/www/3.052/3.052CourseReader/3_Engi...

1.0: http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Table_of_Contents.html

2.0: https://web.archive.org/web/20140810022659/http://www1.appst...

I highly recommend Engines 2.0 rather than the original. Drexler's conception of nanobots before he had done the heavy lifting of working out the designs that showed up in Nanosystems probably aren't very practical compared to more factory assembly line structures. Thermal motion is just so much easier to deal with in an enclosed tube than at the end of a wobbly arm.

Essential Cell Biology is pretty good one to start (Ch 2-7): https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Cell-Biology-Bruce-Alberts/.... There are numerous books like Machinery of Life that don't go in to enough details. Most books specifically on subject of protein structure, dynamics and folding are advanced textbooks like Introduction to Protein Structure by Branden and Tooze. My experience has been that following all the details is very difficult without taking formal classes in these subjects and there is an immense amount of details that is probably not relevant to our purpose of computational prediction. Hope is that someone soon writes Protein Folding for Programmers :).

Machinery of Life is a fantastic introduction to an intuition for what proteins and the mechanics of their scale.

https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Life-David-S-Goodsell/dp/03...

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