Ask HN: Are there any books that inspire or highly influence the way you work? - azuajef
======
MaxLeiter
Kind of a different one, but How to Win Friends and Influence People
dramatically changed me as a person (with some effort, which the foreword
explains)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People)

~~~
gadders
Agreed. Whatever you do in business, if you can master relating to and
building rapport with people it will make things a lot easier.

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mitchelldeacon9
Here is a list of books that I have found most useful in my daily routine,
both as a Linux systems administrator at work, and more generally as a human
being learning to deal with other people. As always, I welcome correspondence
with anyone about these texts or related topics: mitchelldeacon9@gmail.com

PSYCHOLOGY / SALES / MARKETING

Berne, Eric (1964) Games People Play

Carnegie, Dale (1981) How to Win Friends and Influence People, revised ed.

Cialdini, Robert (2006) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, revised ed.

Covey, Stephen (1989) Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Ekman, Paul (2007) Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to
Improve Communication and Emotional Life

Gray, John (1992) Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

Greene, Robert (1998) 48 Laws of Power

Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow

Munger, Charles (1995) 'Psychology of Human Misjudgment', speech at Harvard,
unpublished

Packard, Vance (1957) Hidden Persuaders

Patterson et al. (2012) Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes
are High, 2E

Sun Tzu (ca. 400 BCE) Art of War

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY / STATISTICS

Bowden, Mark (2011) Worm: First Digital World War

Brooks, Frederick (1995) Mythical Man-Month, 2E

Hunt, Andrew and David Thomas (1999) Pragmatic Programmer

Levy, Steven (2001) Crypto: How Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving
Privacy in the Digital Age

MacCormick, John (2012) Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future

Mitnick, Kevin and William Simon (2002) Art of Deception

Poulsen, Kevin (2011) Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar
Cyber-Crime Underworld

Raymond, Eric (2003) Art of Unix Programming

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005) Fooled by Randomness, 2E

_________ (2010) Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2E

Torvalds, Linus and David Diamond (2001) Just for Fun: Story of an Accidental
Revolutionary

Williams, Sam (2002) Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free
Software

~~~
falloutx
> Levy, Steven (2001) Crypto: How Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving
> Privacy in the Digital Age

Thanks for telling me about this. I read about 50 pages of it on kindle this
weekend. Its a beautifully written book.

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akulbe
"So Good They Can't Ignore You" and "Deep Work" both by Cal Newport.

Also, another vote for both Covey's 7 Habits, and "How to Win Friends and
Influence People".

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rprameshwor
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

I read this book last year and it greatly motivated me to get things done,
fight against procastination and overcome anxiety.

~~~
rcavezza
Can you elaborate on what you liked about The War of Art? I read it earlier
this year and I really wasn't a fan. Maybe I need to change my mindset about
this book.

~~~
rprameshwor
Trying to recall my memory - While reading the book, i could many times relate
it to the problems i have been facing in life and my day to day work. Reading
the book helped me pictures those things as a 'RESISTANCE'. I used to
procastinate things for next day, i was reluctant to speak up and reach out to
other co-workers. After reading the book i was able to convince myself that
this was just a resistance and if i wanted to be happy and successful, i would
have to overcome this resistance. I'm not saying i'm a completely changed
person after reading the book, but it definitely had positive impacts in my
life.

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devilsavocado
7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It's one of the best selling books of all
time for good reason. It's much more than tips and tricks for getting work
done.

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Huhty
The Millionaire Fastlane - I know the title sounds cheesy, but the book will
open your mind about a lot of things (the value of time, etc). Really good
read to pump you up and get that entrepreneurial spirit flowing.

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supernormal
Here are few that have influenced my work:

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - Richard Hamming

The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

The Humane Interface - Jef Raskin

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

The Art Spirit - Robert Henri

~~~
ffwacom
have a copy sitting in the corner, just curious how the art spirit influenced
you?

~~~
supernormal
At the time, the book helped me develop a new way to see and receive the
world. I then applied that into my own life to shape what type of ideas and
projects I'd go on to pursue. It helped me find a type of clarity in where I'd
focus my energy in the areas I believed in. And looking back, along with other
things, I'm able to source the book as an important stepping stone to how I
approach my work today.

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shams93
Who is Fourier? That taught me to think of calculus and mathematics as a form
of human language rather than something that I had resisted before I got into
computing, at the time i was a poet and performance artist I didn't see the
value in pre-calculus, trig and statistics, now complex math is a basic part
of my every day work doing training of machine learning AI.

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elihu
Momo by Michael Ende. It made me think about how to work at a sustainable pace
and to focus on the things that matter in my life.

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securingsincity
Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble. “If it hurts, do it more frequently, and
bring the pain forward.”

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axrd
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

Yes everyone is an Elon fan already, but the book offers a great inside look
into how he thinks and how he faced down some incredible challenges. The book
really inspired me to think bigger and to optimize for impact.

------
Jtsummers
_Mythical Man-Month_ , Fred Brooks [0]. Very informative series of essays on
his experiences and lessons learned with IBM. If nothing else, helps to
properly frame my expectations on projects with respect to resources needed to
properly coordinate with others, and the pros and cons of adding people to
projects at different stages (and in different roles).

 _Getting Things Done_ , David Allen [1]. Useful toolkit for getting things
out of my head and onto paper (or org-mode or OmniFocus) so that I can
properly focus and prioritize my time on the things I need to get done.

 _Communicating Sequential Processes_ , C.A.R. Hoare [2]. Strongly influenced
the way I think about programs in general, but specifically in the embedded
field where I work. (NB: I've not actually read or worked through the full
text, but mainly taken what was needed to properly communicate ideas in my
designs or to analyze designs and systems others have produced. This is a task
for myself for early next year.)

 _Moonwalking with Einstein_ , Joshua Foer [3]. I've always had a good memory,
I actually picked this up to give to a girlfriend who had a terrible memory
and read it in a couple days before giving it to her (she was out of town when
it arrived). Helped to explain methods that I'd somehow developed over the
years, and gave me concepts and a better understanding of other methods of
memory acquisition (for either short or long term purposes). If you really
want to improve your memory, there are probably better resources to learn
specific techniques, but this was an informative and entertaining overview.
WRT work, we have to keep large systems in our minds all the time, and
potentially dozens of different systems written in different languages. Memory
is critical for this, even if it's just the memory of where to find the
information and not the information itself.

 _Fluent Forever_ , Gabriel Wyner [4]. This one is my current read. Goes back
to _Moonwalking with Einstein_. While the book is itself about language
acquisition, it's actually given me quite a bit to think about with respect to
general learning and memory acquisition (in this case, specifically for long
term retention and recall). We have a couple training programs (we need more)
for our new hires on development and testing. There are some concepts in here
and in related readings that I think would greatly improve how we teach these
folks what they need to know and in a way that would improve their retention
of that information. We have a lot of people retiring in the next 1-3 years,
so this is actually quite critical right now, though management is quite
lackadaisical about it.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-
Engineeri...](https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-
Anniversary/dp/0201835959)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-
Produ...](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-
Productivity/dp/0142000280)

[2] [http://usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf](http://usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-
Remember...](https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-
Everything/dp/0143120530)

[4] [https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-
Forget/...](https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-
Forget/dp/0385348118)

=========================================

EDITS:

 _The Toyota Way_ , Jeffrey Liker [5]. I grokked Lean from this. Hardware
focused, but the concepts can be (and have been) generalized to other process
focused fields. This has helped with understanding what business processes
really need to be codified, what feedback mechanisms need to be present for
improvement, the criticality of bottom-up feedback and improvement (employee
investment in the company/product cannot be overvalued if you want quality and
good craftsmanship).

 _The Little Schemer_ , Friedman & Felleisen [6]. Going back to the comments
on _Fluent Forever_. The structure of this is fantastic for conveying and
helping students retain information. The Socratic method is very useful, and
structuring courses and introductory material in this format is useful, this
happened to be my introduction to it (well, I'd heard it before, but my first
time really encountering it in practice). It's a useful tool for solo-study of
a topic (pose your own questions and construct answers), and as a method of
guiding someone to a conclusion or better understanding. Also useful in
debugging software or decoding software you didn't write, after a fashion.

[5] [https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles-
Manu...](https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles-
Manufacturer/dp/0071392319)

[6] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-
schemer](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-schemer)

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itamarst
"What Machines Can't Do" \- the concept of an aesthetic of process has really
changed how I think about software development.

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cdvonstinkpot
"Purple Cow" by Seth Godin

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Bus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Business_by_Being_Remarkable)

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bsvalley
"Before you quit your job" by Robert Kiyosaki. It definitely did...

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miguelrochefort
Getting Things Done by David Allen

Look no further.

