Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

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That's funny, I recently had the same revelation (that it's hard to discover these things) with engineering students in mind. I wrote an e-book called Digital Superpowers, covering many of the same topics you did. I added some general interest things on art and publishing too. I think I like your approach better.

Anyway, my list of topics is as follows, maybe you want to consider adding a few of them to your list?

Password Managers • 2-factor authentication • Virtual machines • Package managers • Command line • Routers • QR codes • Port forwarding • Python • Pandas • Onion routing • Ad-blocking • PDF reordering • Flow charts • Regular Expressions • Time-lapses • Encryption • Column edit • Digital photo editing in RAW • Audio noise reduction • Vector graphics • Making websites • DJing • LaTeX publishing • Reference management • pandoc • git version control • Programming • Web apps • Self-hosting • Home automation • Monte Carlo • VPNs, • ImageMagick • Linear regression • ffmpeg • Sphinx • Robotics

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Superpowers-readily-available...

That's the one?

EDIT: I guess it is, via https://digitalsuperpowers.com/. The list of topics is great, gonna check the book out!

That's it! Let me know how you like it. It's my first foray into writing books. Walking the line between utility and breadth is tough.

Bought it! I'll shoot you an e-mail with my thoughts once I'm through.

Hopefully you change the recommended tools based on the OS. (i.e. OSX would be slightly different from linux for certain commands). And focus on doing as much as possible from the command line?

I tried to highlight examples that are available on Mac, Linux, and Windows through the package managers, (homebrew, apt, chocolatey) and at least provided system-specific installation lines for each based on those. It is highly command-line and pure-text centric.

As a computer Science graduate with no experience doing images that section alone was worth getting the book for me. I plan on using at as encyclopaedia for future uses.

I am happy you had compatibility in mind as I am not super fussed on which operating system I use.

I would suggest adding a virtual desktop section as that has been the biggest gamechanger for me ( I use windows 10s with virtual desktop enhancer) I dont know any linux or mac equilivants though.

Glad that was useful, thanks for saying so! Great idea on virtual desktops.

I'm pretty confident in claiming macOS and many Linux desktop environments natively support virtual desktops. It's really only Windows that doesn't.

this is insanely ambitious, and in a weird order

You're right. And "covering" is a strong term for the book. It only introduces them, offers a few exercises, and moves on. It's still 200 pages. It's intended to help engineering students (mechanical, civil/structural, nuclear, etc.) discover these wonders and then choose which ones to go deep with based on their needs and interests.

Thanks for sharing and seems it would be useful for non-engineering students as myself as well. Going to check it out =)

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