Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?
Pls provide link if the course materials are available anywhere.
I read it in my second year of studying computer-science during the summer break, and it completely changed how I view computing.
First of all, the contents alone are quite valuable, even though it is an old book, as it basically walks you through building a simple relay computer on paper, with a CPU, RAM, simplified input devices, teaches you Intel 8080 assembly as an example of assembly programming, and then even goes over a simplified BIOS, OS, GPU and higher-level languages at the end, and it does not assume you have any previous knowledge; it starts from the basic physics behind electricity, then goes into boolean algebra, logic gates, etc. It's basically computer-architecture for the layman.
Beyond the content of the book, I think the biggest mark it left on me is that it taught me that there is no magic behind the layers of abstraction, and that breaking problems and concepts down into simpler ones can make what initially seems like a very complex topic into something that someone can easily follow and understand.
After I read the book, a lot of things I had already learnt at university felt like they made more sense, and I then took courses like Computer Architecture and Digital Circuit Design, where I felt a lot more confident than I probably would have, had I not read that book. It definitely colored how I viewed a lot of the courses I took at university after having read it.
In my career as a software developer, I still often think about that book, and I love to learn things by re-inventing the wheel and building simpler versions of complex existing software.
The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" by Venkat [0]
Other contenders:
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [1]
Haseeb qureshi's articles on Negotiating [2]
These along with er... mind-altering substances, helped me see that reality as we live it (careers, status, institutions, ect) is like software: built/programmed by humans and can be changed by shifting your perspective.
[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGhTQ4iruLc&list=PLfc2WtGuVP...
[2] https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...
Carl Sagan has a better acclaimed book on the topic.
1.) Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police
ISBN #: 0813337445
2.) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
ISBN #: 9780671728694
Both should be available in most public libraries, but with the ISBN you can usually get almost anything via inter-library loan.
An amazing book. I'm not sure how it's particularly career-path-impacting, but it is fascinating being able to follow the cause and effect chain in Germany leading up to and all through the war (in excruciating detail).
He does sound a little preachy sometimes but the underlying concepts/frameworks are coherent.
With special mentions to K&R as well as The Manager’s Path.
Why it is cool?
Because instead of R, Gadoop, Spark, Python, whatever... it started explaining data science with excel.
The best part for me was optimization.
What's the most career altering *course of action* you've gone through?
And the other one was Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
It taught me to not limit my imagination and to think of creativity as a way of approaching problems rather than something limited to art. As a developer, it genuinely changed the way I think about building things.
He basically took business strategy and applied it to personal life and career choices.
I learned how to write high performance JavaScript code directly to the DOM without a bunch of abstraction bullshit. Turns out this proved to be a bias because our experiment code frequently executed faster and failed far less than the actual production code that went out later.