Ask HN: What excellent technical books have you read in 2021? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What excellent technical books have you read in 2021?

24 pointsprimax10 comments

I'm currently switching from a career in devops consulting to launching a startup that relies heavily on data engineering. The first book I've picked up to sharpen my skills is 'The Pragmatic Programmer' by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, as it seems to be the most recommended book in HN threads.

One of the recommendations in the book is to learn a new language every year, and read a technical book every month. I'd love to know what technical books you've read and why they are great.

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Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann is one of the best technical books I've come across. The author achieves just the right amount of breadth and depth while keeping the narrative interesting and not academically dry.

Reading that too - it's quite good!

Understanding Software Dynamics (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) 1st Edition by Richard L. Sites (https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Software-Addison-Wesley...)

This is a recent book and I have not completed reading it but I know already is it destined to become a classic. If you are serious about learning how to understand and improve code, this is the book for you. (Full disclosure: Dick is a long-standing friend and one of the brightest and insightful guys around.)

Writing Efficient Programs (Prentice-Hall Software Series) 1st Edition by Jon Louis Bentley (https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Efficient-Programs-Prentice-H...)

This book is out of print but I believe it's a better read that Jon's Programming Pearls books. C is a great (and permissive) programming language. Jon shows how the language can be exploited for gain performance. Evil but effective.

Hacker's Delight 2nd Edition by Henry Warren (https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-2nd-Henry-Warren/dp/0...)

The Hacker's Delight is exactly what Hank Warren intended--a collection of tricks and facts that programs can exploit. It's informative on many levels. It uses deep knowledge of how numbers (and other mathematical objects) work to compute useful information. And it shows how seemingly arcane information can be useful. For a programmer excited by the fabric of programs, it is a continual delight.

The first edition has a clarity and compactness that I find appealing. The second edition has additional material. When you get through all of the Delights you can read Knuth Volume 4 which embeds more arcane and useful knowledge.

Technical books 1.) Have the LOWEST resale value out of any another other published material. Versions of new software outpace the updates and changes and thusly are placed on sale and bargain bins.

Even authors complain about changes and versions in the foreword.

2.) Reinventing the wheel is common practice. If one is unable to see the same replicated patterns in technological adoption on only look at ideological standards of industrialzation. From Mainframe and Dumb Terminals.. to Cloud computing and updated hardware.

3.) Keep a set of decent cookbook style recipes and in the meantime go help a Rosetta Stone project website rebuild/remake a algorithm or pattern in the "new" format.

4.) Trends are meaninless and create new complications later down the road. More so with relying on libraries that were rewritten from the ground up to "just work". Time to rewrite your ASM to C to Perl to C+ to Java to C++ to Python to .Net to Euler to Go to Rust.

5.) Stay off the hampster wheel of training if you haven't been replaced by an offsite worker it just means the automation system isn't ready yet.

Find out why LISP is was always going to be a ultra expensive waste of time. Find out why Plan 9 was never made sane. Stay away fron the insanity of being controlled by market forces.

Eric Raymond's Art of UNIX Programming is excellent for budding programmers, even those who are not UNIX enthusiasts.

I am not as convinced as Mr Raymond that UNIX is the be-all and end-all of computer operating systems, but regardless of one's position on that, the book is filled with practical lessons, illustrated with many real-life examples. It focuses on general principles and not nitty-gritty details of UNIX.

Take a look at Docs for Developers (https://docsfordevelopers.com/) if you want to brush up your documentation writing skills.

For me it's dchest's "Password authentication for web and mobile apps"

https://dchest.com/authbook/

Read this a long time ago and probably nothing new but Clean Code by Robert C. Martin is golden.

If you're interested in Rust then I really recommend Rust Programming 2ed: Fast, Safe System Programming.

> I really recommend Rust Programming 2ed: Fast, Safe System Programming

I believe you meant "Programming Rust 2ed." It really is a great book.

I've heard great things about Clean Code. If I'm nearly done with the Pragmatic Programmer, does it cover a lot of similar ground (if you've read both)?

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