
Ask HN: What are the best books that changed your life in 2015? - tequila_shot
Folks, what are the best books that you read in 2015 that changed your life?<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gatesnotes.com&#x2F;About-Bill-Gates&#x2F;Best-Books-2015<p>link already has a lot of lists. But I want to see books that are more relevant to CS.
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vincentbarr
Asking a book to change one's life within the course of a year seems like a
tall order.

That said I recommend Chade-Meng Tan's 'Search Inside Yourself'[0].

Chade-Meng Tan began his career at Google as software engineer and later
transitioned to teach a course – that this book describes – on emotional
intelligence, mindfulness, and self-awareness. Allegedly, the course was quite
popular at Google. I highly recommend the book.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-
Achi...](http://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-
Achieving/dp/0062116932/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449533517&sr=8-1&keywords=search+inside+yourself)

------
bluenotebook
Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality. A lot of concepts from CS are used,
but it spans across a wide variety of intellectually stimulating topics.

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danieljoonlee
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/155981.Psycho_Cybernetics...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/155981.Psycho_Cybernetics_A_New_Way_to_Get_More_Living_Out_of_Life)

It has completely changed my thought process and helped me with self-
realization.

Not CS relevant, however an interesting read.

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colund
_How Google Works_

\- Gives interesting insights in the healthy values at Google.

 _How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking_

\- Interesting discussions about correct/incorrect interpretations of
data/statistics.

 _Black Hat Python_

\- Gives short code examples of what can be possible to do.

 _Programming Collective Intelligence_

\- Outdated but very inspiring hands on examples of ML in Python

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LifeQuestioner
Myth of Sanity. Not CS relevant though, sorry.

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coderKen
clean Code [http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-
Craftsman...](http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-
Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882)

------
brudgers
Beyond contributing to the change in my thinking over the past year, I'm not
going to suggest that any of these books changed my life in the way that the
_Bhagavad Gita_ or _Leviathan_ or _Foucault 's Pendulum_ might. Particularly
since these are Computer Science related per the RFP. Anyway:

1\. _Art of Computer Programming: Combinatorial Algorithms, Volume 4a_. This
stuff is hard. It's harder than I can imagine. [It's worth noting that this
probably clarifies my definition of "read", since I've only read a little bit
of it so far and only really grokked a little bit of what I read].

2\. _Programming Clojure_ made me make sense of the truth underlying the joke
"Clojure is just a Java library".

3\. _The Art of Unix Programming_ [1] made me understand my experience living
through the transition from MSDos to twenty years of Windows and think about
what I had lost and missed and how my understanding of software and design had
been shaped. It also helped gain better intuitions when using Linux. [2]

4\. _Starting Forth_ [3] because Forth is worth learning. It's worth learning
because it changed the way I think about programming languages.

5\. _The Art and Science of Smalltalk_ [4] for the same reasons as Forth, only
more so. After reading about Smalltalk, I felt I began to understand the "Why"
of Ruby. Ruby became many times richer with the context.

6\. The weird one is _The RSpec Book: Behavior Driven Development with RSpec,
Cucumber and Friends._ It's also the one that changed my thinking the most
[caveat: it's also the most recently read]. I saw someone's "port" of RSpec to
Clojure [6] and had saw the Turing Tarpit swallow Lisp. Until then, my smug
weeniness didn't allow for the possibility. But implementing an internal DSL
for RSpec missed the beauty of RSpec's design. I saw Lisp through the eyes of
it's detractors. It's a case where Lisp's parentheses make an elegant idea
grotesque.[7]

7\. [Bonus] _The C Standard Library_. Trigonometric values are produced via
the dark arts.

[1]:
[http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/](http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/)

[2]: Please note, I am not anti-Windows or anti-Microsoft. There are tradeoffs
all around.

[3]: [http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/](http://www.forth.com/starting-
forth/)

[4]:
[http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/Art/artAdded17418618...](http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/Art/artAdded174186187Final.pdf)

[5]: [http://www.thriftbooks.com/](http://www.thriftbooks.com/)

[6]: [https://github.com/slagyr/speclj](https://github.com/slagyr/speclj)

[7]: Please don't get me wrong. I don't dislike Lisp. I'm not arguing that the
repository is typical, or that anyone else should find RSpec's design
attractive. What I saw was that as an internal DSL, RSpec's design baby goes
out with the Ruby bathwater in the land of Clojure internal DSL's.

