Ask HN: What are the best tech books you read in 2021? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best tech books you read in 2021?

95 pointshintymad30 comments

Mine are Statistical Inference in Computer Age, and Transactional Information Systems. Curious what other books teach us powerful concepts and tools that carry us a long way

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Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

This is indeed a great book.

I am on frontend ATM but still learned a lot that is applicable from this book.

I've seen the book is available on audible. Do you think it's possible to benefit from the audiobook?

I'd imagine the audiobook wouldn't be as good as the paper version of this book because:

- I find I often want to go back to earlier sections, to review a concept that's relevant to the current part, and

- Much of the information has structure that's hard to keep straight without pages and text formatting

i see quite a bit of overlap between the book and his lecture series on distributed systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc...

These lectures give a more theory based approach, while the book is more based on discussing practical systems; now both are covering distributed systems as such.

Now the distributed system audio course on youtube is extremely accessible (i listened to them while taking walks with our dog)

The book is also great, Kleppmann is writing in a very accessible style.

Likely not, it's a book that relies on the visual representations of how things are laid out a bit too often.

What that means in practical terms is that you'll be presented with diagrams and need to pause and think what they really mean.

This context will likely not be translated well in the audio form.

its a tough book, i had to read some of the later chapters many times but it definitely expanded made me a better engineer

This and Database Internals. I'm more of a sales engineer that continues to flirt with moving to engineering full-time. These two books have really opened my eyes to both better system design and implementation details.

Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom

Same here

Can't wait for this. I'm still on his 'patterns' book. He's such a good author.

Software Architecture: the Hard Parts https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-architecture-t...

The title is quite enticing, as trade-off in systems design is what we ponder on a daily basis.

Writing High Performance .Net Code by Ben Watson

Worth the read?

Designing Distributed Control Systems

This seems like a fascinating book. What work/interest led you to reading such a book?

Seems an interesting book. How is it compared to other books about distributed systems?

Is this the one? - Designing Distributed Control Systems: A Pattern Language Approach

Can you provide a short summary please ?

Can you send a reference for. “Statistical Inference in Computer Age?” There are several books with similar titles.

My bad for getting the title wrong. This one: https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Age-Statistical-Inference-Ma.... You can pick the student edition too if you’d like exercises.

You can also get a free pdf from the author - https://hastie.su.domains/CASI/

Team Topologies: Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow.

Haven't finished reading it yet, but it's been enlightening and thought-provoking: "The Essence of Software" by Daniel Jackson.

Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface (2nd Edition) by David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy

But how Do it Know? The Basic Principles of Computers for Everyone - J. Clarke Scott.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andy Hunt

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