Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2019? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2019?

51 pointsfuzzymind33 comments

Any books you cannot wait to read next year? Or is there something you really wish to learn? Curious about all kinds of great book suggestions for 2019. Thanks for sharing!

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Programming Rust. I've used it in the past and never quite felt great about a few aspects of it (lifetimes, for example). Now however a work situation is arising where Rust might be preferred, so deep into the pool I go.

It'll make me a better programming regardless, so it's good for me. I look forward to improvement :)

Not quite book, but I would like to read all laws and regulations related to business, finance and taxation such as the Companies Act etc as applicable to India. I will be transitioning to becoming a businessman in 2019 and its pertinent that I make myself at home with these topics so that I am not swindled by lawyers and auditors, or even the government for that matter.

From what I heard, best thing is to have a good lawyer and a good accountant recommended by somebody in business you can trust.

Not saying you should either learn on your own or have somebody recommended to deal with this for you, I thing you should one and the other.

I do wish you luck, I am still gathering courage to venture into business on my own :)

Thanks for the wishes, and I hope you do it soon as well :)

I am one of those people who don't trust people easily. And given the increasing amount of white collared crimes being exposed, I am completely disillusioned with these professionals. Of course, I will have to avail the services of these people but I want to make myself bulletproof against their well established work ethics. Not only do I not want to get swindled, I also don't want to be led astray. I want to conduct business honorably.

On a tangent: I’d like to hear from someone who has studied law or similar with regards to how to break the ice on such topics? I’d personally love to have “knowledge of” something like copyright law, but I don’t even know how to approach it.

I’ve bought the Critical Chain by E. Goldratt two weeks ago and I’ve been enjoying the anticipation of reading it. The Goal was a real eye opener and I hope that the Critical Chain will bring me new insights on project management specifically (the Goal is a great introduction to lean methods but it is heavily geared towards manufacturing processes).

I really liked The Goal (though the family side story was a bit strained at times, the experience with his kid and scouts in a "model" environment was useful though).

While it is geared towards manufacturing, I think pairing its concepts along with Mary Poppendieck's writings on Lean in software development is very helpful. A lot of her writing (especially the more introductory books) put in the effort to translate Lean Manufacturing ot Lean Software.

For instance, we don't have "inventory" in the physical sense. There's very little cost in the retaining of un-shipped code. But there is cost in that we don't get value from it. And our understanding of it goes stale over time (for the individual who wrote it and the organization who "owns" it, especially if the creator leaves or moves to other projects).

Pairing her work with writings from traditional Lean and Theory of Constraint sources (focused in manufacturing) is an excellent way to take those theories and apply them to our field.

Thanks for the pointer to Mary Poppendieck, I hadn’t heard of her. Which book of hers would you suggest I pick up first ?

I think the first one I read was Lean Software Development then I went through Leading Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development.

It's been a while, but as I recall the latter two can be treated something like workbooks. How to go from "traditional" project management towards lean/agile. The former introduces many Lean concepts but within the software development world. So that's where I got the idea (maybe I'd seen it before I read that book?) about treating developed, but not integrated, code as "inventory". It has a cost because we have to eventually integrate it but it'll become "stale" over time as its interfaces or other features become further from the main branch.

If you have a Safari Books Online account they're probably in there. I found them to be fairly easy reads, perhaps spending 2-3 weeks on each. Applying it at work, of course, has taken a lot longer.

Sci-fi

- Ready Player One

- Pattern Recognition

- Burning Chrome

- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

- Hyperion

- A Fire Upon The Deep

Technical (backend development + security)

- HTTP: The Definitive Guide

- RESTful Web Services

- Designing Data Intensive Applications

- Web Scalability for Startup Engineers

- The Art of Software Security Assessment

- The Web Application Hacker's Handbook

- A Philosophy of Software Design

- Clean Architecture

- The Go Programming Language

- Refactoring (new 2nd edition)

- Algorithm Design Manual

- Cracking The Coding Interview

I'll definitely be able to get through all the sci-fi novels, but not the technical stuff. At minimum I need to go through the technical interview prep books, refactoring, and designing scalable applications.

Yay! Read Hyperion. Its a great book. I've literally read a couple hundred sci-fi novels and it's one of my favorites.

Several books by Jerry Weinberg (started last year) on systems and Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows.

Alongside those, my current job has me programming less, so I'm enjoying it as a hobby again. I've decided to pick up Common Lisp again so I'm going through various texts on it as exercises to relearn the language and its extent.

I've had a wonderful experience with all of the No Starch Press[0] books I've bought over the last few years. I recently got Absolute OpenBSD and Serious Cryptography. How Linux Works is also really good if you would like to brush up on your knowledge of the architecture of the average Linux system.

I'm not affiliated with them, I just haven't gotten a bad (or even mediocre) book from them.

[0]: https://nostarch.com/

Any thoughts on their humble bundle?

They've got a couple of different options (Linux and hacking are the ones I found with a quick DDG search). I have yet to read any of the books in the hacking bundle or most of the Linux ones but I would expect that they would be good considering my previous experiences.

* The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

* The Algorithm Design Manual

* Cracking the code interview

* Some Elixir books

Not sure if this fits the criteria but I plan to read the Unbearable lightness of being this coming year.

So many people have recommended it that I cannot not ignore it any longer.

Tech:

* Programming Phoenix, latest edition. I plan on launching a side project with Phoenix in 2019.

* The Rust Programming Language. I want to build simple CLIs in Rust as my gateway into the language - will use what I lean here to do it.

Non tech:

I have about 25 unread history, art history, and culture books in my bookshelf. My plan is to exercises self-restraint and not buy more books until I finish these!

95 Best Books for Smart Minds to Read & Re-read for a Refreshing Start in 2019:

http://casualwalker.com/95-best-books-to-read-in-2019/

I'd love to begin the year with a book on Rust and another one on being a team manager/lead because I got promoted as a lead (a team of 8) but I totally feel I'm unprepared.

Congratulations on your promotion! Let me recommend the classics: _The Phoenix Project_ and _High Output Management_ by Andy Grove. The latter is from 1983, but the principles are in use in my company today, and it is the start of OKRs, used by Google and others to this day.

Thanks for the suggestions, these books have just been added to my shopping cart. I'm afraid to not have enough experience (5 years) and so I'm trying my best to overcome any lack of experience with study.

Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena)

Mindset by Carol Dweck. I feel that I'm stuck in a fixed mindset in some areas, so I want to explore ways of dealing with that.

Terrible book. The concept is explained in two or three pages and repeated during the whole book without introducing anything new.

Watch a free YouTube review and go spend the money and time on something else.

1. Bad Blood, John Careyou

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

3. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

4. Zero to one Peter Thiel

5. The republic – Plato

6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

7. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd Kindle Edition

8. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

9. Never split the difference

10. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Hardcover

11. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

12. Economy course: https://www.core-econ.org/

I actually was part of the CORE team. It's nice to see people actually reading it!

In my (biased) opinion, it is a very good introduction to the _economy_, though it is perhaps too light on _economics_ [0]. That is to say, it is much, much better than other introduction-to-economics textbook at presenting the relevant facts about the economy but is a bit light on analytical tools. If one wants to go beyond this textbook, they would have to learn them. If I were to offer a comparison, CORE econ is to traditional econ textbook what a natural history of the universe book might be to a physics textbook: many more topics covered including those that would not be addressed in an intro textbook but less studying of models.

Hopefully, if it catches on, we will hear fewer people arguing "Well, it is just basic economics that X" where X is something that it true in the toy model of econ 101 that is useful for learning but not really in real life.

I would suggest completing this book with some econometrics - since it is those tools that allow us to (try to) see which theories may be right and which may be wrong. The books by Pischke & Angrist are good: "Mastering Metrics", and at a higher level, "Mostly Harmless Econometrics".

The Journal of Economic Perspectives [1] is a great resource to learn more about a topic in economics. As it says: > The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) fills the gap between the general interest press and academic economics journals.

The HN crowd would also most likely like the Quantitive Economics lectures [2] from Sargent & Stachurski.

[0] It is also a low density textbook, which seems to be common in American textbook

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/jep

[2] https://lectures.quantecon.org/

Thanks for this. I'll have a look at the books you mentioned.

Never split the difference can be a life changing book, at least for me it was.

I still have to put it to practice more but now I know that the tools are there.

Can’t recommend it enough. I would force everyone to read it every year if I could. That’s how good the book is.

I second this book. I was just negotiating a new car the other day. I was much better than previous car purchases, but I still need more practice.

The Prime Number Conspiracy, Heretics of Dune, and Im looking for an investment book to read.

Here’s a few:

- chapters 4 and 5 of SICP

- Fowler: Refactoring, 2nd Edition

- Gehl: Cities for People

- Cohen: The Book of Numbers

- Drnaso: Sabrina

Finally reading Goedel Escher Bach.

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