Ask HN: Best technical books you've read so far? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best technical books you've read so far?

11 points_8j505 comments

HN,

There was a recent post about best books you've read in 2022. I am not a book-person, I don't read fiction. Even technical books I don't care much for them except once in a while I pick up a really good book that goes really in-depth into a topic giving me all kinds of insights and that book I can't put down!

Not just in 2022, but what are the top technical books that are similar that you have read?

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Here's a book I really enjoyed. "But How Do It Know? - The Basic Principles of Computers for Everyone."

It's a surprisingly accessible, plain-English explanation of... logic gates. Exactly how it is that so many programming tricks are derived from simple binary numbers.

At some point it occurred to me that specific functions exist in programming languages solely because they map onto things that can be easily accomplished with the underlying circuitry...

Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People by Aditya Bhargava is a fun and very approachable walkthrough of some common algorithms. With the illustrations it reads smoothly and isn't dry like a normal algorithm book.

After reading this review [1] I'm not sure about this book. I see this book gets so many positive ratings, in the same time this single review stands out and brings many worrying points... Is this reader just frustrated person expecting too much? Or are the points raised valid?

[1] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R31YAU39RVET5J/...

Some of their points are valid. I wouldn't recommend this book to someone who's already deep into the world of algorithms, but it gave me an enjoyable way to dip my toes in when I first started learning about the topics it covers. I'm not sure what the page number issue on Amazon was about, my copy is 238 pages.

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessey and Patterson.

Transaction Processing: Principles and Techniques by Gray and Reuter.

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