Very Short Introductions

Lenny Smith's "Chaos: A Short Introduction" is an absolute gem.

Lenny's book is an absolute gem for anyone working in statistical modeling, time series analysis or prediction of any sort.

Every ML engineer should read it and weep.

EDIT: I agree with the comment that the series is inconsistent, due to the length. I find that more niche topics are treated better than the surveys of huge fields (like "Philosophy").

Good series. Reminds me of the erstwhile USSR's "Science for Everyone" series from Mir Publishers (https://mirtitles.org/category/science-for-everyone/) which i loved.

I have three books (Sound, Waves and Mathematics) from this series which are pretty good.

A series with a lot of potential but unfortunately the books themselves are way too inconsistent. You are better off using Wikipedia and /r/ELI5 in most cases.

The entire series could benefit from more editorial oversight so that the books have consistent information density, tone and writing style.

VSI thermodynamics is my favorite so far, it covers statistical mechanics of gasses, Boltzmann distribution defn of temperature… if you don’t know what these concepts are, I am confident you can get a good intro from the VSI thermodynamics book.