If you're interested in games / startup stories, I have to recommend Masters of Doom, about the early days of id. It's thrilling and exciting to read: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult... - It's also in the news that USA has ordered a pilot for a TV adaptation. Here's hoping it's good!
If you grew up playing Doom, and all the other shareware games like Hexen, Heretic, etc... reading about Id Software's start and history is more interesting than I ever thought it would be.
Another book that drew me in was "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels". It's a collection of short-ish game creation stories packaged into a book. Really candid interviews and writing.
It is a literature masterpiece that magically adjusts to my current inner state. It can be both easy reading when I'm tired and just want to unwind, and thought provoking when I'm ready to be thoughtful.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117833.The_Master_and_Ma...
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability-Dimitri-P-Be...
[2] - https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-6-012-introduction-to-prob...
He worked on the Manhattan Project among other things, writes in a very engaging way and shares a huge number of funny anecdotes. Yet he is also thought-provoking, for example introducing the idea of nanotechnology, explains why he is against pompous titles and posing, and how he struggled with staying creative.
Besides funny stories and grand ideas, there's also a heartbreaking personal struggle. One of those books years after reading I find myself randomly thinking about sometimes.
EDIT: Also, The Phoenix Project is very very good if you are into IT management: funny, and although a novel then the content will make you want to fix your company and perhaps even think bigger about your carrer. But this one won't last you a summer since if you read it that slow you'll forget what was going on. :)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight
Fair warning: it's kinda pessimistic on the future of humankind.
If you like it, proceed to Echopraxia. More hard sci-fi, more vampires, even worse news for humankind.
It is a great book and talks about two systems in which we can divide the working of our brain. Kahneman also talks exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-a...
It's not a breezy quick read, but my favourite sci-fi is always likely to be Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.
Why? I'll let the abstract speak:
"[...] The idea for the book, which is entirely new, is to invite the reader into intimate conversations with twelve of the most famous manuscripts in existence and to explore with the author what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and sometimes about the modern world too. Christopher de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, collectors and the international community of manuscript scholars, showing us how he and his fellows piece together evidence to reach unexpected conclusions. He traces the elaborate journeys which these exceptionally precious artefacts have made through time and space, shows us how they have been copied, who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell), how they have been embroiled in politics and scholarly disputes, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and luxury and as symbols of national identity. The book touches on religion, art, literature, music, science and the history of taste.
"Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts conveys the fascination and excitement of encountering some of the greatest works of art in our culture which, in the originals, are to most people completely inaccessible. At the end, we have a slightly different perspective on history and how we come by knowledge. It is a most unusual book."
- - -
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/213/213069/meetings-with-rem...
Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey (TV show The Expanse is loosely based on this, but IMO doesn't even come close)
Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds
Three Body Problem (all 3 books) - Liu Cixin
Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks (your gateway drug into the Culture universe)
Genuinely wish I could experience all the above for the first time again. And looking forward to checking out some of the others mentioned here.
The ride to the top and then rock bottom for Theranos is a wild one, and the author does a great job of not letting you put this book down once you start.
How to Win Friends and Influence People. - Dale Carnegie
Influence - Robert Cialdini
Books on understanding how to push through adversity
The Obstacle Is The Way - Ryan Holiday
Man's Search For Meaning - Victor Frankly
Books on process improvement
The Phoenix Project
The Four Hour Work Week - Tim Ferriss (ignore the outsourcing bit, listen to his podcast)
Books on breaking out of your thought bubble.
Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
Ishmael - David Quinn
Books for understanding how sales works
Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes
Negotiate As If Your Life Depended on It - Chris Voss
Any of these books are great starts. If the leadership big bites you there's way more I can suggest. Most of these are a mix of classics and new stuff. I've read them all and they want have their own style and provide their own insight. The trick is to find out what parts work with how you do and incorporate them into your flow. The learning process never ends.
Why: Where journalists continuosly provide the trees of human progress, this book provides the forest.
> When they launched, Prometheus was slightly worse than them at programming AI systems, but made up for this by being vastly faster, spending the equivalent of thousands of person-years chugging away at the problem while they chugged a Red Bull. By 10 a.m., it had completed the first redesign of itself, v2.0, which was slightly better but still subhuman. By the time Prometheus 5.0 launched at 2 p.m., however, the Omegas were awestruck: it had blown their performance benchmarks out of the water, and the rate of progress seemed to be accelerating. By nightfall, they decided to deploy Prometheus 10.0 to start phase 2 of their plan: making money.
I found it very enjoyable, rarely read books in that kind of fictional setting, and have successfully recommended it to a number of friends and family. I can't recommend the author's other books though. It has nothing to do with CS.
I should add that this is not a book you will see commonly recommended, since it isn't on many people's top 10-20 lists. However, I originally read it on a summer holiday from work - and I hope others will share in enjoying it too.
[1] - https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/on-the-shortness-of-life.pd...
Unlike the stoicism books that teach you to condition yourself to be unaffected by external events, this is a method for taking charge of what goes on inside the body and (in my case) in the mind and emotions.
As an aside, if you haven’t tried audiobooks, I would recommend trying. I find that after a while day of staring at the screen I really don’t want to stare at anything else, so my book consumption dropped considerably. With audiobooks I was able to restore it somewhat (and it’s great for filling in lost time during driving).
https://www.amazon.com/Zoology-Robert-Dorit/dp/0030305047/re...
I used to read books on physics, but I think I learned an order of magnitude more about the world we live in from the above book, and it didn't require more than a high school level understanding of chemistry and biology. I read three more books on various topics in biology afterwards.
Otherwise, if you are the sort of person who can stomach a theoretical book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is really the kind of book that takes a while to get through, but you start seeing things differently afterwards. It discusses how large organizations can mean well and do evil.
Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
What's better than to have a good laugh, even if already read it, is always a nice book. And if you finish it fast, you have the rest of the series ahead.
Please keep it coming, but try to stick to one book each. This isn't as much about keeping the list short, more to make you decide on one title which is more interesting than the others you've read.
As for my recommendation:
- technical - "Mythical Man-Month", if you haven't read it yet, - "Dune" by Frank Herbert - I just love re-reading it in the summer!
Packed full of quality advice and techniques that you can use out of the box. The real-life stories he had from his FBI negotiating days make it an easy read.
As a tool to understand the people of the time, the stories that grew and the 'person' behind the dominant religion of the Western World - there is no book that comes close.
Don't expect to have fun chats with religious (Christian) friends after reading this though, as much of what you learn will differ from the bible that they were taught, or the uniqueness of Jesus as a prophet/zealot.
Still - a book that I found a hugely interesting historical/religious read last summer, and one I recommend to my friends.
Once into the modern world, he provides an overview of current interpretations and their experimental support.
Becker's book is, I think, the best lay person's explanation of the problems QM was invented to solve, the Copenhagen Interpretation itself, and several of the more modern interpretations.
Great, mind bending read.
A true story written with naked emotion by someone who experienced the life altering disaster on Everest.
It’s all too relevant right now with another recent calamity on Everest.
An excerpt from the opening words:
“The Everest climb had rocked my life to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete detail, unconstrained by a limited number of column inches. This book is the fruit of that compulsion...
Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it—mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. It hasn’t, of course. Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. But I hoped something would be gained by spilling my soul in the calamity’s immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment. I wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish.“