Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?
Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?
349 points by debanjan16 11 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 174 comments
If you were to choose one book (or maybe more than one :P) to lure a curious person to your field of study, which will you choose?
For example: How to Design Programs for Computer Science.
Note: It has to be inviting for someone that knows nothing about the field but becomes hooked after reading it. Not some epitome which is revered by experts only.
"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott
I started my career in international development, and the book above provides a dozen case studies on states using scientific management, stats, etc. to try and control their growth/populations/economies and failing miserably.
It is a beautiful book in that it illustrates how difficult it is to actually manage a country and economy well, especially if you are trying to completely change it (i.e., "develop" it, solve poverty, etc.). It humbled me as a 22 year old "professional" wanting to fix the world.
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs is a close second to this theme of economic, technocratic development.
EDIT: I notice 22 upvotes. WOW! If you are a fan of this book or curious to hear more, please comment. Happy to elaborate. If you want a third book, The Evolution of Civilizations[1] is another fun one here. It tries to apply scientific principles and hypothesis testing to historical analysis!
[1] https://10millionsteps.com/review-evolution-of-civilizations
This book is next on my reading list. One question that's come to mind before having read the book is if Singapore is an example of a highly-legible planned state's success?
I wouldn't say so. Scale matters. What worked for Singapore, may not work for China.
There is this great article about the story of Singapore[0], it was also discussed on HN some time ago. I believe one of its main takes really resonates with "Seeing like a State" thesis.
Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases
Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.
[0]
https://palladiummag.com/2020/08/13/the-true-story-of-lee-ku...HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249
Singapore and Hong Kong are exceptions to general trends. Being a small city state/port city gives you the ability to do things that larger states aren’t able to do (similar to banking havens in Europe like Luxembourg and Lichtenstein).
That's a beautiful question. I am not intimately familiar with Singapore's planning processes. The authors above (Jane Jacobs, James C. Scott) would argue that the best cities/countries are ones that have a centralized strategy that leaves enough leeway to enable each community to optimize their specific situation on their own.
I don't know if Singapore does that or not. Do you have a POV?
I've been meaning to read Lee Kuan Yew's "From Third World to First" to learn more but haven't found the time.
Singapore does have the advantage of being compact and having the ability to set policy at all levels at once. The US can't do that, because cities and towns depend on the state and federal governments for funding, but those same cities and towns have some autonomy in how they run day-to-day governance.
I was really drawn to the topic by reading Origins of Political Order by F. Fukuyama.
“Seeing like a state” taught me what high modernism is and it’s pitfalls (since I - and I imagine many readers of HN - are already familiar with its strengths and achievements e.g. modern medicine).
Poor Economics is a book in a similar vein that talks about how policies that sound like they would be effective can backfire.
(I am a software engineer and found both of these books approachable and interesting.)
I'm a big fan of his most recent book
Against the Grain
One thing I've observed is population growth control - be it reducing the growth or encouraging growth - always fails miserably. For example many people have heard of the one child policy in China, but the facts are that both the introduction and the removal of the policy had no perceptible effect on fertility rates.
Interesting. Do you have a good source for this? Googling it is just the same (Chinese source) line repeated over and over:
> National Health and Family Planning Commission spokesman Mao Qunan said the agency’s work had reduced the number of births in China over the years by “400 million”.
Nothing much about the effect of the removal of the policy either.
The reduce of population is not the effect of the policy, but the effect of economic growth. It would have happened without the policy. On the other hand, the policy created tons of horrible human rights violations, such as forced abortion against the mother’s will and gave her the dead body of her child.
http://funtobebad.blogspot.com/2012/06/china-forces-seven-mo...
This is definitely not true. There was a decade of population growth control mechanisms in the decade before the official, universal one child policy. Over that decade (the 70s) China experienced an incredibly sharp reduction in fertility.
It’s likely that increasing socioeconomic wealth would have naturally followed that trajectory, but it’s unarguable that Chinas fertility policies accelerated the drop.
It's pretty obvious if you ignore the great leap backwards... I mean forward, coming down from ~40 births/1000 in the 1950s and 1960s to ~20 in the late 70s and after.
You mean to ignore the dip during the leap, ignore the spike in the 1960 (assuming this is the recovery from the leap), so that we would have ~flat line up to year 1970?
Jane Jacobs, "Systems of survival" is also a good one. Formulates a theory about corruption and the nature of it. Changed the way I think about it forever.
PiHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin is on its face a book about love and chemistry. Taken together it becomes more of a treatise on how psychopharmacology is a method of personal and sociological analysis. Drug use becomes a psychological tool to manifest the phenomena of the mind that are normally hidden, and novel synthesis becomes a tool to then access the areas of the mind unexplored throughout history. Aside of all this, the Shulgin's story is one of absolute dedication to science in the face of its many impediments: internal psychology, interpersonal relations, social stigma, technical innovation, and authoritarian censorship.
You've said everything I could ever say about PiHKAL; it's a masterpiece. TiHKAL, published three years after the Shulgin's lab was raided by the DEA, is also a fantastic read.
Finally, a question on HN I am "qualified" to answer. During my university education I came across Structures[1] by J.E. Gordon who, unlike me, was an aeronautical engineer but his take on structures really made so much sense to me, as a student of engineering, in a way that the fustian delivery of the professors at college did not. Some books stay with you for life - this one did for me.
[1] Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J.E. Gordon. Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245344.Structures
I can confirm that this book made me interested in "real" engineering (as in, engineering physical things in the real world rather than abstract symbols) when I read it. A bit too late for a career change, but I have talked to a few other people who hold this in high esteem as well. Good recommendation!
What makes you think those "abstract symbols" are not real?
Surely the fact that he put “real” in quote marks is sufficient to not have this tiresome argument.
Thank you debanjan16 for constructing a well-formulated question that delivered lots of high-quality additions to my "to read" list!
Strangely enough nothing is coming to mind for my field, technical writing. Docs for Developers is great at covering the end-to-end basics of a high-quality documentation process. But I feel like there is some book out there that has inspired me to think more deeply about how to effectively communicate ideas and instructions to other people, which is the true heart and soul of technical writing as an art and science. How We Learn by Benedict Carey is the right direction but I don't remember thinking of it as a masterpiece.
I think a lot of people are completely missing the point if they're recommending textbooks or prescription-like books - it's very likely you were already interested in these subjects beforehand and are really just upholding that book as a great solution.
What really gets people interested is the narrative behind these subjects. What interesting thing happened within that field of study? What are the current problems we can solve and where are we headed? And the less the technical mumbo-jumbo, the better.
Michio Kaku's books - "Physics of the Future", "The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (", etc. are the sort that would really influence young, fresh minds to pursue physics. He details what happens, and what could be to a sufficient detail without overloading the user with the mathematical rigour associated with these math heavy subjects.
A very tough question. I feel that it might be quite hard to lure a curious person into Computer Science, who doesn't know anything about the field yet.
One of the books I liked (since I actually studied Linguistics in my Bachelor's) and what drew me towards CS was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.
The best book that I have read in the computer science.
What about a book for Linguistics? I also studied Linguistics and now while I still find the knowledge useful (getting to describe to my son a voiced vs unvoiced plosive) I am not as interested in it anymore.
"don't sleep there are snakes" - half an adventure book, half linguistic analysis and explanation of a fairly unique language.
Very interested in this. I'm currently learning a second language and my programmer brain keeps getting side tracked by _human language as an abstraction_ in and of itself. I'd be very interested in a basic intro to linguistics book that starts from first principles and goes through what grammar fundamentally is, syntax, morphology, etc.
For general linguistics I've enjoyed a couple small books by Frank Palmer: "Grammar" and "Semantics".
I randomly picked Code off a library shelf when I was a child, not sure the exact age but probably 13 or earlier, and it drew me into programming.
Code by Petzold is 100% my choice as well. It is an incredibly good book to describe not just code but computing and ultimately computing machines. I would give my 18 year old self Code and it would've done a very good job of piecing all the college courses that I would end up taking.
I think maybe some of the history books could do it for cs. Like I'm very early into the book Crypto Anarchy, Cyber States and Pirate Utopias (2002 MIT PRESS), and it's kinda interesting. I'm not sure how the later parts are but chapter 1 is interesting. It definitely has an audience in mind but I think it could be an interesting book for someone outside of CS.
It stays interesting, or at least it did for me. A lot of the thoughts in there capture the spirit of reflection during a long since ended period of the Internet but there are some timeless ideas as well. Enjoy!
This book was absolutely revolutionary for me
Another one like code but even more gentle is Understanding the Digital World by Brian Kernighan
"Deep Learning for Coders" (aka Fastai)
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/deep-learning-for/97814...This book will take you from knowing nothing other than high school algenbra to knowing both practical applications and theoretical foundations and best practices for AI. If you're interested in AI and machine learning, you need this book.
True!!. Also with video tutorials are great source for learning. I like the way Jeremy explains every concepts in simple english.
Is there any truth to the Amazon comment that says that the code in the book is outdated?
No. Video is not a sustainable learning medium.
I think Masters of Doom is a great book for getting people interested in either software development in general, or game development. Alternatively, some of the horror stories may actually turn them away. But every time I read it, I get excited about writing code again.
I loved the book and the stories in it, but I did have your alternative experience: it put me off wanting to work in the games industry entirely!
I've read a lot of books and it definitely stands out. It's so inspiring as a programmer.
Agreed, re:
Masters of Doom. Given the inherent interest of the subject matter to its likely audience, that book was much better than it had to be.
Same is true for Steven Levy's Hackers.
I'm currently writing (almost finished) a book that's designed to get people into a junior level IT position as a systems administrator (in an environment with public Cloud infrastructure):
https://upload.academy is the platform it will be launched on (also my platform.)
I'm hoping to enable people to get into this amazing field of ours so that they can enjoy a better life with better options and long term economic prospects.
Rebel Without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez. I'm a filmmaker and that book glorifies guerrilla filmmaking like no other. Really fun book by the guy who unfortunately didn't go on to make very many critical successes but
did create the masterpiece of cinema that is Sharkboy and Lavagirl
Code by Charles Petzold then doing Nand to Tetris has given me an abiding (though amateur) fascination with computer architecture, which lead to building a 6502 machine and reading about lots of other architectures.
I came here to mention this book. I think it's a great introduction to how computers work and well written.
I went through the nand book too,it's amazing. What do you mean exactly by building a 6502 machine? In real hardware? You bought a 6502 and created a whole computer from other bits?
Yes in real hardware, though its a breadboard computer where the io is push buttons and an led array. So more a computer in the 70s hobbyist sense. I learned from Ben Eater’s youtube videos which are a good followup to nand to tetris.
Accounting...
The rule of accouting is that if anything excites you about accounting you shouldn't do accounting. The most fun I had studying accounting was learning about tax evasion, money laundering, defrauding stakeholders etc. Any academic book about forensic accounting could be deemed interesting if you just read only the case studies.
What book on forensic accounting would you recommend for entertainment value?
I have some knowledge of french accounting, been exposed to US style, and thoroughly enjoyed long forms involving forensic accounting, money laundering and the like...
Not a book but CNBC's series "American Greed" is great. My favorite episode was about a guy who was (on paper) the second largest biodiesel producer in the country. He was literally just making up fake green energy credit numbers in a spreadsheet and selling them to companies looking to buy green energy credits.
The EPA was made aware of him but did nothing even after they physically inspected his biodiesel "factory" and discovered it was basically just an empty warehouse.
What finally brought him down was his taste for expensive sports cars and his being an asshole neighbor. He was always parking his sports cars pn the street, blocking school bus stops, etc. Local parents suspected he might be a drug dealer because of how many cars he had and how lavishly he spent his money, and they asked the local police to look into him. It was the local investigation that uncovered the fraud and brought him down.
https://advancedbiofuelsusa.info/rodney-hailey-sentenced-to-...
> The EPA was made aware of him but did nothing
Did the EPA give any reason?
Harry Markopolos's
No One Would Listen. A bit over the top in places, but entertaining.
> The most fun I had studying accounting was learning about tax evasion, money laundering, defrauding stakeholders etc.
Sounds like hacking.
I am surprised that Algorithms to Live By has not been mentioned. (Disclaimer: I am still reading it.) That book is both accessible and practical for any layman. However, just enough hints at variations of the discussed algorithms are given that even a non-technical reader might be motivated to dive further into theoretical CS and read a paper or two.
I would go with "Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical" by Lakatos, its a dialog-form history of defining Euler's formula and it shows the human side of mathematics as a science. I think its great as math has this unique status as providing with undoubtable knowledge but history shows that human error is possible even in this field.
Alternately "The Unreality of Time" by McTaggart, it has less than 20 pages and argues that time doesn't exist since it is logically incoherent.
Not sure if this would get someone hooked up but for me those two were extremely fun reads.
EDIT: Just to be clear – both are meant as philosophy books, even if they touch on other things. :)
Philosopher here as well. I'd strongly recommend Thomas Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution". It's a beautiful book that shows how ancient astronomy, cosmology and philosophy were interwoven, with valuable lessons for how science works even today.
From the classics I'd also recommend Hume. The "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" is short, very well written and argues, among other things, that causality is an illusion :)
I second Lakatos, but more general introductions to philosophy that I always recommend are
Simon Blackburn: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (not intended as an introduction but IMO it makes a really fun introduction)
Thomas Nagel: What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy
My "field of study" is more like a hobby, but the definitive book is "Racing the Beam" by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort. If you're at all interested in retro game consoles and especially the clever tricks old programmers used to push these systems to their limits, it's an incredibly fun dive.
(Racing the Beam) :-) and agreed, amazing book.
(1) Real Mathematical Analysis, by Charles Pugh is a wonderful introduction to pure mathematics for a mathematically inclined engineer. The back cover starts like this
> Was plane geometry your favourite math course in high school? Did you like proving theorems? Are you sick of memorising integrals?
(2) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I think it's impossible to read this (or a number of other works of Sacks') and not be mesmerized by the workings of the human brain. Disclaimer: I wouldn't call neuroscience my "field of study" even though I did study it.
Regarding Pugh: what was your knowledge before Pugh?
Not my fields but.
The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg for economics.
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman for design in any aspect.
Closer to my field of organisational performance/psychology.
The Fearless Organisation by Amy C Edmondson.
Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist should do the trick for anyone considering contemporary art in galleries, museums, etc, and it’s also a great read for artists and collectors.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20613616-ways-of-curatin...
For me personally this helped a lot with the decision to create an international art center (small, and still under construction!) instead of just pounding my artist head against the wall of the market forever.
But generally speaking, it’s an eye opener and a great illustration of how to generate influence from enthusiasm. It’s probably hard to read if you aren’t already familiar with European contemporary art, but it rewards patience.
I am not a cryptographer but I do work in security and The Code Book by Simon Singh is an excellent history of the history of cryptography/cryptanalysis presented as periods through history where the pendulum swung between giving the edge to the code makers or breakers. The code makers have been ahead since about the 1970s.
> The code makers have been ahead since about the 1970s.
Or so the code breakers would have us believe…
I picked that one up because of a similar recommendation, but didn't finish it. I think I was expecting an extensive collection of different ciphers throughout history with some short historical anectodes to go along with them. But it's really more about a few selected historical applications of encryption with a heavy focus on their historical context.
Been on a cryptography kick lately, so I went to the city library a couple days ago to find what they had, and I came out with this book.
So far, I've gotta give the +1 on this one.
Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. I used it for years as a required text in pretty much every UX related class I taught. Entertaining, super digestable and very nutritious.
I expected to see this one or "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. I don't know a designer who hasn't read one or both.
Materials Science: Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik
https://archive.org/details/StuffMatters
Very accessible and fun to read, and the book is structured around introducing a lot of fundamental materials science concepts in the context of everyday objects (silverware, chocolate, etc)
There was a 3-part BBC TV series by the author called "How It Works" which convered essentially the same material which I far preferred to the book - I don't have a stream link, unfortunately.
Cool! I hadn’t seen the series before. Seems like it predates the book actually, which I wasn’t really expecting
I haven’t found a streaming link yet, but these (related?) clips look pretty interesting https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hkyfr/clips
I would say Geoff Rayner-Canham's "Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry". It is obviously a university level teaching book, but I find it very appealing and not really hard to grasp. It made me fall in love with chemical processes and
some material science concepts.
Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata
It teaches Latin in a very cool way, where the entire book is written in Latin but it starts off with simple sentences anyone with a Romance language background can understand, before diving into deeper sentences, all while being illustrated so one can still follow the plot if they're stuck.
It contrasts with very dense Latin books that focus on grammar and spelling, which often bore students. LLPSI instead takes readers on an entertaining journey.
This book is awesome. I wish they made something similar for other languages (actually French has a video series, French in Action, that is similar but not quite as effective as LLPSI).
Search for “nature method <language>“. There are a few books in this style for various languages.
Dutch has the Delft Method, it's a textbook and some additional materials.
It seems that people who recommend LLSI rarely mention the accompanying workbooks. Do you feel like they are a good value add, or is Famillia Romana strong enough on its own?
Consider the perspective someone who does not know anything about this book previous to reading your comment. Searching Amazon for Hans H. Ørberg is not likely to make it clear which book (or books) you are actually recommending.
LLPSI Pars I, Familia Romana
LLPSI Pars II, Roma Aeterna
These are the two main books. Each has companion books such as exercise books and teachers' guides. After these two, you should be able to read Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, but Ørberg also has other books.
As for whether the workbooks are worth it, I never used them, but then again I only read the main book for leisure, not in an academic setting or for serious study. If you're in the latter, then I'm sure the workbooks would help.
I occasionally pickup and read my old Wheelocks Latin.
Geology: The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Though he does such a good job of passionately portraying so many topics in these books I feel they could get people into any one of the earth sciences. Hell, even politics and economics.
Anyone interested in product management shoulder read "INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love" by Marty Cagan.
This book both introduced me to what a PM is and showed me that I already am one in my role at my company. And it opened my eyes to a few new directions and inspired some ideas.
"Fermat's Enigma" for Mathematics
"The Pleasure of Findings Things Out" for science
"How To Draw: Drawing And Sketching Objects And Environments From Your Imagination" for concept art / industrial design
Eloquent JS, for coding,
On Photography by Sontag for Photography,
Anything James Baldwin for literature,
Anything Angela Davis or Emma Goldman for political theory,
A blank (perhaps square lined, Rhodia brand) notebook and a pack of Stabillo pens for creativity.
Eloquent JS is well narrated. +1 from my side.
Eloquent JS changed my life. It made me realize that it would be hard, but I really could do this.
The entire ray tracing in one weekend[1] series is really good book for getting into computer graphics. It covers a simple implementation of path tracer and getting the image is really satisfying! Modern hardware and light simulation makes art fun!
[1]: https://raytracing.github.io/
Girard's rhetoric never fails to keep me hooked. I treasure any number of works of Girard, whether his introductions to Type Theory and his Linear Logic or notes on his quest for Transcendental Logic. Clear prose of exposition, to the point and clearly motivated, intermingled with literary allusions in critique of philosophers' ideas of truth, the work of Girard is truly a gem.
Particularly entertaining is his 'A pure waste of paper' (Appendix A of 'LOCUS SOLUM') (https://girard.perso.math.cnrs.fr/0.pdf). I could flip to a random page of his 'appendix' and just sink in.
A fine introductory work of his to the subject would be 'PROOFS AND TYPES' (https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/ats/papers/girard.pdf).
Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine for computer engineering.
One of my favourite computer engineering books. Highly recommended.
It is off-topic, insofar as it's not my field, but let me answer a dual question:
The Vital Question by Nick Lane made me think that were I to start over, be young and finish school, I'd study biology and biochemistry.
If you haven't read it yet, pick up "Sex, Power Suicide" as well. Very dense reading but I learned something new or understood something I knew better from basically every page I read.
"Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Typography Works" - Spent at least a decade now doing design work to some degree (graphic design manager now) and while I read this one recently it's hands down the most easily accessible, no bullshit,
funny design book with meaty tips and thoughts. Heartily recommend to basically anyone.
"The Art of Responsive Drawing" by Nathan Goldstein.
It's an in depth analysis of the elements of drawing and, more importantly, what those elements actually do. It really celebrates the expressive and creative aspects of drawing, in a way that's both beautiful to look at, and accessible to read.
As a volcanologist, I feel everyone should read "No Apparent Danger" . It's quite a critical account of the profession, so it might not "lure" you, but it's what you need to read if you are interested. Accessible and full of true drama and tragedies you probably didn't know about.
Original poster: Did you mean "tome" when you said "epitome"?
For Medieval Studies I recommend the novels of Umberto Eco.
Especially Baudilino.
Mathematics:
Burns, Marilyn (1975) I hate Mathematics Book, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Brown-Paper-School-Books/...
Mathematics, philosophy, music, molecular biology/biochemistry, computer science, visual art, poetry, cognitive science:
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid. New York, NY: Basic Books.
("GEB")
Computer Science:
Abelson, Harold and Gerald Jay Sussmann (1984) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
("SICP")
Stoll, Clifford (1989) The Cuckoo's Egg. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Linguistics:
McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil, William Cran (1986). The Story of English. New York, NY: Viking.
https://archive.org/details/storyofenglish000mccr
Accounting:
n/a
Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault)
Not my field of study or existence, but what happened in a bare hundred years to make public execution private, and prisons into factories into schools?
It's a great book, you should read it.
The Republic (Plato)
How do you get someone to listen to you? (first answer: threaten them with violence). "Footnotes to" etc.
After spending more than a decade and a half in the field of software development/computer science I’ve come to realise some fields simply are not attractive to many/most people of other fields. Not at all.
Hell, CS is not attractive to a lot of people working in the field. They work because it pays the bills.
So no, at the risk of sounding like I’m full of myself, I’d say there’s simply ZERO such books at least for computer science.
It’s a very specific field that many people get zero exposure to from school till the end. Unlike fields like history, arts, even medicine/diseases etc.
Measurement/A mathematicians lament by Paul Lockhart.
The first is not by any means very advanced/interesting mathematics per se,
but it is written by somebody with an incredible passion for mathematics, which you
can feel throughout the whole book, and which was totally novel for me coming from
schoolish mathematics drudgery. Also, the way he approaches mathematics and teaching is quite interesting.
Nothing for somebody who is already into mathematics, but as an entry point it is absolutely great.
The second is a critique of school math, freely available online (
https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/Lockharts...), that absolutely hits home on a lot of problems of math and school in general, but in a way that basically says
"Look, its so cool, why are we ruining it? Lets do this better." which is much better than another bitter, destructive critique. And its well written and only twenty pages. Definitely recommend.
Physics & Mathematics - Anyone who seriously pursues these fields learns to embrace the challenges as beautiful and the struggle to unravel their nature as fulfilling. To do this, we embrace the beauty in nature and see the connection with everything around us. Four books come to mind.
Physics:
1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman
2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Steven Hawking
Mathematics:
1. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by J.A. Paulos
2. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by D. Hofstadter
These books brilliantly illuminate the beauty in these fields. They show you that underneath all of that complex notation and "math speak" are beautiful ideas about life, the universe, and the nature of reality. These fueled me, even in to my PhD research. I still love them today.
Aha! GEB! Do you think a complete beginner with no knowledge in higher math should read GEB?
GEB really doesn't have much complicated math. If you're willing to spend a bit of time thinking about the (logical) concepts presented, you should read it just fine.
Introduction to the Theory of Computation,
Michael Sipser
Atul Gawande - Better or Being Mortal
Non-technical but very interesting and emotive to most people.
Healthcare analytics
I would also add Complications to that list. As a former life sciences researcher, I've loved everything that Atul Gawande has written.
Came here to say this. It's maybe starting to feel a bit out-of-date, but it's still got the hook.
the Selfish Gene.
this book can attract people who want understand how creatures work
Chaos by James gleick for multiple fields in physics
Professor Sapolsky on Chaos (class on Human Biology/Biology of Behaviour):
Chaos year after year after year in this class provokes the strongest opinions.
A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it.
About half the people never quite figure out what's up with it.
And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They no longer have to meditate, they no longer have to have a—just they are at peace. At peace, I tell you.
Because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology, taking apart a world of reductionism. For five hundred years we have all been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems, which is, if you want to understand something that's complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces.
And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing. And what Chaos as an entire field is about—and this was pretty much the first book that was meant for the lay public about it—what Chaos shows is, that's how you fix clocks. That's not how you fix behaviors. That's not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock, behavior is like a cloud. And you don't understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together.
So read through that book. A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological, so we'll just be suggesting the chapters you should read.
I will tell you it is the first book since, like, Baby Beluga where I've gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front. Because, along with Baby Beluga, it's had the greatest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college. So that is a sign.
Sapolski's book (Behave) and his Stanford classes on YouTube are just awesome.
Lifespan by David Sinclair would be my recommendation if you want to energise someone for molecular biology/ biotech
For me it was Dawkins' "the selfish gene" that drove me to biology. It's quite eye-opening how the simple rules of evolution result in this enormous diversity and complexity we see in nature.
The art of electronics for electrical engineers. It is dated, but it has everything
Except a good scientific explanation of how transistors work, how to build an amplifier given a number of constraints (power, bandwidth), how to design an antenna ...
It's a nice book for hobbyists, though.
The code book, by Simon Singh.
History of cryptography, really fascinating.
For logic: Language, Truth and Logic by AJ Ayer. It is an account that tried to introduce logical positivism to the English speaking world after the author visited Vienna in the 1930s. While logical positivism didn’t pan out, the book is full of the excitement of resolving multiple perennial philosophical problems all at once. The author’s enthusiasm is infectious.
For a more sociological view of what happened to logical empiricism in the US (and I'd argue, to analytic philosophy in general), George Reisch's "How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic" is awesome.
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, is perhaps one of the more interesting books on food science that is not a cook book. It's not something that you would read straight through, but great none the less.
Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold is perhaps the most beautiful group of cook books, although quite pricey.
Professional Goldsmithing by Alan Revere is hands down one of the best books on jewelry fabrication in precious metals.
As a former chef with 33 restaurants of experience and a lifelong passion for science, I can say that if you have an interest in "the science and lore of the kitchen" (subtitle), you must own McGee's On Food and Cooking.
For Industrial Engineering or Operations Research, I'd say The Goal by Goldratt. An easy to read novel that leaves you looking at things differently.
Ones I would suggest as gateway drugs would be:
The Code Book, by Simon Singh is a very accessible history of cryptography and its role in historical events.
The Nazi Census, by Aly, Roth and Black, is an important survey of how data collection methods get used for bad things, and I recommend it to anyone doing large scale systems architecture, or working in privacy. (replace statisticians with 'epidemiologists', and you start to see a theme.)
The Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon is beautiful, and gives you an intuition for concepts like bandwith, signal, message entropy, finite fields, among others.
Power, by Jeffery Pfeffer, when combined with the Dictator's Handbook by Smith and DeMesquita forms the foundation for any serious management and strategy consulting.
GEB, by Hofstader was a way to have an intuitive frame of reference about cognitive science and theories of mind, which I think are going to be the next great cultural battle ground, and also relevant in the context of machine learning, and consulting.
My field? Security, privacy, and risk management.
Not exactly my field, but I think "Building a Storybrand" by Donald Miller is a great read for everyone dealing with creating products customers love.
The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin.
Puts recent developments by SpaceX in context, and shows how we really are about to settle the cosmos in an economically sustainable way. A call to action to anyone who wants to participate to start making space companies now.
Radical Abundance by K. Eric Drexler.
Re-introduces the concept of atomically precise manufacturing (aka molecular nanotechnology) and shows how it can solve basically all major global problems from climate change to energy crisis to wars over resources.
I don’t think a really good title exists, but the closest might be “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Control Room” by Gregory McMillan. It is basically a comic book written by an engineer in the industrial controls field.
It's not my field, but feels like an appropriate answer.
After the recent death of the myrmecologist EO Wilson, I decided to order a couple of his books and have spent the last few nights reading "Journey to the ants". It has been completely fascinating, I can't put it down.
If you're looking into user experience/usability, then:
"Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug
"Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman
the James Herriot series is a good, light-hearted (if not outdated) intro to the veterinary industry.
“Our mathematical universe” by Max Tegmark.
I’m not a physicist, but this book took me very close to abandoning my CS career and getting into theoretical physics.
A hobby rather than a field of study, but
Open Crumb Mastery by Trevor Wilson made me fall in love with sourdough baking, it's amazing. I'm baking regularly for 2 years now since reading it and has gotten pretty good, even with difficult pastry like croissants and panettone.
The book is described explicitly as "not for beginners". Do you have a recommendation for beginners?
I like Ken Forkish’s
“Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza”
Working as an UX Engineer, I always recommend „refactoring UI“ by Adam Watham. It‘s super easy to read, most pictures speak for themselfes.
This book targets developers who like to put their UI on the next level.
"The Name of the Wind" by Pat Rothfuss.
(I'm a fantasy fiction writer)
I've read (or listened to) this book maybe five times. Maybe for a bit of context for someone who's not that into fantasy fiction. The crazy thing about it is that is the basic story is the most standard wizard book ever. It borrows more than a little bit from the classic Wizard of Earthsea for example.
But Rothfuss just takes every one of those tropes and wires them together into absolute riveting story telling. He basically perfects the genre.
If it takes another 5 years for the last book to be released, I might just take up fantasy writing myself and come up with an ending for it, I guess it invites the reader into the field that way..
Note that this is part of a trilogy that hasn't had the third book released and its been 10 years. I doubt it will be out in another 10, so tread with caution if you don't like to wait on a book release. Amazing book though.
I think the trilogy is unfinishable. There's no possible way you can end this in a single book.
Anyway, it may be for the best (think Matrix 3 and 4).
"The Slow Regard of silent things" is also a beautiful book that builds slowly and expands a little detail of the world of "The name of the wind"
Kicking away the ladder by Ha-Joon Chang
Industrial development and political economy, it really is a must read for anyone even mildly interested on the field, then you could go to Joan Robinson's criticism of Ricardian economics, but these are slightly more in depth topics
"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini (1984)
"How to Make Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie (1936)
Two great books that could lure a curious mind into sales. However, I recommend both to everyone.
"The Molecular Biology of the Cell", an actual textbook. It's like the owners' manual for your cells.
If we are recommending actual life sciences textbooks or literature, I would recommend the Hallmarks of Cancer, which is actually a review article. Simply reading that alone will give someone a strong basic understanding for how cancerous tissue actually develops and evolves capabilities until it becomes deadly.
This had great impact on me…and the quick read of Ptashne’s “a genetic switch” really pulled me into molecular biology. They helped me start to conceptualize how a group of inanimate objects (eg proteins, lipids, nucleic acid) can collectively be “alive”, including reproduce, and “make decisions”.
Software engineering
- Steve Wozniak’s autobiography
- The Phoenix Project
- The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
Robert Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic" for mental health / clinical psychology / psychiatry.
I feel the question highlights how stupid it is to limit yourself to a single field of study.
How Hollywood Tells It, by David Bordwell.
I think there ought to be a book that explains how the modern world works at large, that'd include many many fields of study and explain how they all work together.
I'm not aware of anything of the sort. If anyone else knows, let me know :)
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I found this entertaining:
How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39026990-how-to-invent-e...
It's written in a comedic style, and takes you through what you would need to build to "reimplement modern civilization" if you found yourself stuck back in time.
"Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty.
No matter your opinion on his politics or the reference to Marx it's interesting and the data collected is vast.
any physics book for hs... but without penalty of failing tests etc. Why sky is blue, how does heat get to earth from sun, how do computers work, how does magnet work, how to tell how far ball will go if i throw it, why do balloons stick to wall when rubbed, etc....
