
Secret Hacker Bookshelf - jacquesm
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/top-dozen-hacke.php
======
pclark
This is a good list, but if you're a startup founder you generally only need
to know 1% of each of these books. Don't buy them all. If you had to choose 3
books from that list, what would they be?

~~~
andymitchell
(Caveat: As a hacker with an interest/need to learn marketing)

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - just the best overview for how to get out
there (in the words of Steve Jobs, "it's a noisy world, the best you can ever
hope or ask for is that just one single idea about what you do can be
remembered"). Also might as well throw Positioning in there as its compliment.

Made to Stick - how to encapsulate a single idea, and hook it in people's
minds

Founders at Work - a huge boost of motivation and some interesting individual
strategies that people used, but light on useful tactics or broad strategies
that you can action.

Not on the list, but I really highly recommend, is "Letting Go of the Words:
Writing Web Content that Works" - an absolute bible for how to get your words
on a website to be read and remembered.

~~~
shadowmatter
Love Made to Stick and Founders at Work. I haven't read 22 Immutable Laws of
Marketing, but I'll check it out, thanks.

One excellent marketing book I recently read is Different: Escaping the
Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon (no ref link:
[http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-
Youngme...](http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme-
Moon/dp/0307460851)). She believes that going tit-for-tat on adding features
and augmentations is a losing game that results in every competitor looking
like one another. Instead, you should find your strength, and focus on that
while resisting to focus on where your product falls short. The book is also
very... poetic. She's quite a quotable writer. Good stuff.

------
dotBen
The quality and relevance of the books on this list seem mixed at best.

Maybe I'm cynical but the original page looks like linkbait for the guys
affiliate code to Amazon. I'm saddened that HN has found this so 'useful'. I
think we could do a better job crowdsourcing the very best and relevant books
together on a "Ask HN" thread.

~~~
jacquesm
It's fairly easy to criticize something that somebody did, but it's usually a
lot harder to do better.

From what I understand about how Daniel put this together, he wrote some
software to create these lists, he did not try to add his own 'value
judgement' to what got on there or not.

Presumably he could have done a better job, but that goes for any piece of
software, so instead of saying that 'we could do a better job' try to be
specific and indicate which books you think belonged there and which did not
(and maybe why?) that way Daniel has something that he can use to try to
figure out if he can improve things.

There have been many attempts at 'crowdsourcing a list of relevant books' but
none that I've seen got longer term traction and I'm _really_ happy that
someone is willing to invest the time and the effort in to making this happen.

First versions almost always suck, now let's see how to make it much better
than what it is today without diminishing the contribution in a way that reads
as though you think Daniel intends to score 'big bucks' from this somehow.

~~~
dotBen
I understand your perspective, but I don't think a list of books generated
from best sellers/most popular is the way to go... after all that's why I
don't want to get an MBA - because it's the same old populous thinking that
actually ISN'T the way forward nor most relevant to startups.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
dotBen --

Boy are you preaching to the choir. It's weird to see my own objections to my
own article repeated back to me.

I'd like to make a couple of points for you to consider:

1) Regarding monetizing the links, there are two possible arguments: a) that
it is beneath the quality of the board to publish sites that monetize so
blatantly, and b) it was an attempt by me to somehow "game" HN so I could
(presumably) make a buck from something that people liked.

This is a startup-related board. Hundreds, if not thousands of startup
founders read and post here every week. Guys that are making money using
Adsense on free web sites, guys that are making money on freemium models, guys
that are trying to get as much traffic as possible and worrying about the
money all the time. No matter what kind of application or startup you have,
monetizing eyeballs is part of the discussion here. At the end of the day,
each bit of traffic means server costs. That means that there has to be some
trade-off. As several pointed out, print out the list and take it to your
bookstore.

As far as gaming the system and making the board go to hell, let me remind you
that we've had "rate my startup" posts for years. Lots of them had blatant
monetization strategies right there for folks to see. Apps asking for
donations, apps using paid recommendations, apps for using gradual engagement.
I think this is a pretty sophisticated bunch of folks. If I thought for just
one second that my post would lead to blatant link-spamming of HN I wouldn't
have posted it. Fact is, HN is already being blatantly link-spammed. All sorts
of articles both on the front page and on the new page have all sorts of
profit models. That's why we vote. I honestly think the quality will continue
on at about the same level as before. If not, then I'll be the first to ask PG
to remove my article. My reputation in the community is not worth the few
bucks I might make off the article.

2) about the following the crowd thing, boy am I in there with you.

I am not a book-seller. I'm simply a startup guy who has read a lot of books
and would like to share that with others. In my post, I recommended that
people follow the discussion on places like Amazon (or here) before deciding
to buy any kind of book. I have to say here that there were a _lot_ of
benefits to the readers (and author) by using those affiliate links. Amazon
serves the image, Amazon provides an up-front price current price before you
click. Amazon even hosts a reviewing an discussion system. All of that is
simply too much to ask for one blogger to put together for one article. I
_strongly_ advise folks to come back to HN and read the discussion and also to
track the discussion over on other sites before buying a book. After all, Ben,
I'm the guy who wrote a blog article a couple of weeks ago criticizing both
popular authors and people who follow their books blindly! So I'm the last guy
to want to see people just follow the crowd in their purchasing decisions. Use
your brain, compare notes, make an informed choice. Even after you get a book,
be careful how you apply it. I really hope that I got that message through.

Finally, why be so cynical? This board is all about hackers and startups. I'm
happy to share my traffic and revenue numbers from the post, I'm happy to talk
about whether or not a website that provided information like my blog article
would make sense. Perhaps somebody else can take what we've learned with my
post and make something of value to people. We're here to learn from each
other, not make a quick buck at other people's expense. That was never the
intention.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Followup with sats from the article and analysis, including profit potential,
traffic, and business options.

[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/the-great-
hac...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/the-great-hacke.php)

------
kls
I think overall it is a good list, one I take issue with is "Head First HTML"
I don't know if it is fixed now, but about a year ago, I tried to teach
someone using that book as a manual and the first chapter was incomplete, It
literally was missing the text so the individual could not continue without
me. Which defeated the point of buying a book so that they could do projects
and learn while I was not around.

For most of the rest that I have read, they are great books first or second
best on their respective subjects. This is one of the better lists I have
seen.

We really should have this kind of post 1-2 times a month as this one (books)
comes up just a little less frequently than "whose hiring". We should also
have one for "tools I use to develop with" I always scrounge out a gem that I
did not know about in those tools posts.

I tell you what would be nice Daniel, would be to have these kind of posts and
have your blog scrape the post for products people recommend and then add
those products to your list, if you could grab their votes you could get a
sudo weight to their product recommendation.

~~~
irahul
From personal experience, "HTML Dog" is a better book than "Head First HTML".
The list is good but if it's targeted toward people not already familiar with
the tooling, some hand holding is required.

For example, "HTML Dog" and "CSS Mastery" may be placed together. As already
suggested on his blog, parallel path recommendations would be good viz. Python
using "Think python", Ruby using "Learn to program", Scheme using SICP .. and
pointing out that if your aim is to learn to program, you can pick any of
them.

But heck, it would be too much work for the poster.

------
shelfu
I'm surprised that The Pragmatic Programmer isn't on there. Am I that much out
of date that this book is no longer recommended? It completely changed the way
I thought of development at the time.

~~~
silentbicycle
Kernighan and Pike's _The Practice of Programming_ covers a lot of the similar
content better, IMHO, often with more concrete examples.

(Also, _The Pragmatic Programmer_ might have more impact if people hadn't been
systematically ripping it off for blog content for years.)

------
tptacek
This list is missing some pretty vital books:

* 4 Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank's mimeograph-quality bible of lean startup marketing)

* Growing a Business

* The Knack

* All of Seth Godin

* Blue Ocean

It's weird that the list has so many big-business suit-and-tie titles (Ogilvy,
New Rules, etc) but is missing small business core titles like these.

~~~
dotBen
You can download 4 Steps to the Epiphany from Stanford.edu in pdf format _(my
preferred format anyway)_.

[http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-
bin/winter/drupal/upl...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-
bin/winter/drupal/upload/handouts/Four_Steps.pdf)

Not sure what the legality is of that but it's there if you want it. Do buy
the book and support Steve if you find it useful.

~~~
quellhorst
That is only 45 pages. The full book is larger, if you look at the table of
contents you'll see that this is incomplete.

------
tseabrooks
I'm a bit surprised at not finding any Seth Godin books. Do you, personally
and as a 'hacker community' not find his books useful? I always felt like they
taught me more about marketing than any other books I'd read on the subject.
Is there something I'm missing in reference to Godin's books?

~~~
niyazpk
I was a big fan of Seth Godin's blog and books until a few years ago. Now I
don't read any of those.

Seth Godin books are good when you starting to read those kinds of books. His
blog can inspire a lot when you are new to his style, but after some time you
realize that many of the articles in the blog (or the books) do not teach you
anything new. They are just rehash of the same ideas over and over. YMMV, but
I have a few Seth Godin books I am not able to complete because the books are
very low in actual content. Every time I start reading them, I put them down
to read some other better book.

So yes, Seth Godin will inspire you initially, but after a while the value in
reading the books and the blog seems to be going down.

But then again this may be a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Or this
may be the case of me graduating from the Seth Godin school of thought. I
don't know.

~~~
dheerosaur
I completely agree with you. In the beginning, when I was confused whether I
had to stick to the illusory safety or to do my own thing and create value.
Listening to Seth Godin's audio books and some of his interviews had
definitely helped. Sometimes, people need that kind of motivation and
reassurance to get started though they will realize sooner or later. Now, I
don't see the point in reading his books and I have removed his blog from the
feeds probably for the same reason as yours.

~~~
jacquesm
Seth Godins books are like the training wheel equivalent of marketing. But no
matter what, you will always find at least something in there that might
change your perspective, I've yet to see any book that I didn't learn
something from.

------
andreyf
Nice list. I wouldn't expect to see SICP, The Little Schemer, and CLSR next to
Head First HTML, however. Certainly, the former are a bit more timeless.

------
stevefarnworth
Nice to see "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis in there. Best lesson from that
book? "Equity isn't the main thing, it's the only thing", as in, don't give
away any part of the only thing you have of value; your business, unless you
have to.

------
phpnode
I added a book recommendation engine to HackerNewsers a few months ago, but so
far only a few people have added their reviews,
<http://www.hackernewsers.com/books.html>

------
markkanof
Great list, but is Introduction to Algorithms really so good that you had to
list it twice? :)

------
iuguy
That's an interesting list of books, thanks for the submission.

How did you collate the lists?

Where did you get the books from? (e.g. HN, other sources?)

It's interesting to see what's not on there as much as what is. I would've
considered the javascript books not nearly as important as Stephens' TCP/IP
Illustrated, or Tanenbaum's Operating Systems Design and Implementation, but
then again how much use would they be in this modern age (for the majority of
use cases)?

------
edw519
Great job, Daniel. Thank you.

I am familiar with about half of these and the ones that I know are great. The
ones that I don't know are a new opportunity for me.

Nice touch on the front covers. Anyone with a color printer could just print
your page and take it to Borders or Barne's & Noble. Looks like an easy way to
find stuff on the shelves and read a whole lot of Chapter Ones.

------
nessence
Is HN really the new place for book spamming aa links?

Which books don't matter. Half those are outdated or will be by the time
they're read.

~~~
kls
You know you should really take a look at who posted the article and who wrote
the article, jacquesm and Daniel are some of our most respected and
informational members that we have. Both have contributed volumes of
information to this site without asking for anything in return. If there is
anyone one this site that could be accused of having the passion for the
subject matter of this site it would be Daniel.

As is said in the blog, this post comes up quite frequently so Daniel put it
on his blog. Forgive a guy for trying to cover some cost, would you.

~~~
robryan
As well you don't lose anything by giving someone an affiliate sale, so unless
your getting tricked into clicking someones links I think people can tend to
make a bigger deal of it than is needed.

~~~
ntoshev
I upvoted you, but the general problem with these links is that they affect
author motivation, whether or not they realize it. This is especially true for
subjective listings such as this one, they are simply a brain dump of whatever
the list author could think of. That's why you get SICP next to "Head first
HTML", and that's why you don't get "Coders at work" at all, even though it's
mentioned >800 times on this site, vs much less for other titles on the list.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This list was put together by googling "best books" on ycombinator and then
picking each thread and listing the books from top to bottom.

HeadFirst appears because a commenter pointed out that it was a good book that
you wouldn't think of, and this comment got several upvotes. From this thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128713>

There was no "thinking" that was involved in creating the list. It was a pure
mechanical process. That's why there are two dupes and a lot of books that
didn't make it.

I guess to be completely fair I should have written a program to scrape every
book mention on HN and then cross-matched them to aggregate votes. But I was
just trying to make a larger version of an HN comment in blog format, so I
didn't take the time to write up a system. As it was, it took most of the day
tracking down links, book references and such.

I can assure you that there was no finagling with the list or author's
opinions that were inserted. I have "coders at work", and it's a great book.
It would have made my list easily. There are a bunch of other books just like
it. My list would have included more Java books, and books about tracking to-
do items. But this wasn't my list. It was HN's.

------
brown9-2
I think that Effective Java by Josh Bloch deserves to be added to this list.

~~~
room606
If I were to recommend only one Java book, it would be this one. Definitely
deserves to be on the list.

~~~
apotheon
If I were to recommend only one Java book, it would probably be some kind of
"Ruby for Java Developers" book.

I kid, I kid. Kind of.

------
glenngillen
Would be a great list to compare opinions on with various people at
<http://www.5ftshelf.com/>, sadly the computer & internet section
([http://www.5ftshelf.com/mini_shelves/books/6-computers-
and-i...](http://www.5ftshelf.com/mini_shelves/books/6-computers-and-
internet)) is dominated by the head-first series. While I think they're good
intros, they wouldn't rank high on my list on "must own" books in that genre.

------
jscore
I just downloaded PayPal Wars. Any other page turners on this list that you
can't put down?

------
gregory80
this list is huge and awesome. thank you!

I would say JavaScript the Good Parts is pretty much the bible of JS for the
client, the definitive guide is nice, but a lot of stuff in there is very
dated. It's not a good guide for DOM manipulation. The JavaScript cookbook by
shelly powers (c) 2010 is much better.

Also, High Performance JavaScript by Nicholas C. Zakas is a great book for
people who need to go from beginner to intermediate / advanced.

------
alastair
Pretty extensive list... could anyone recommend some less technically
orientated business books (startups, small business?).

------
paolomaffei
<http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/> ?

------
pella
Safari (safaribooksonline.com) offers a good option for reading widely at
relatively low cost.

------
bobx11
A hacker cheat-sheet written by someone with a hotmail address. I don't mean
to judge a book by the cover, but... hotmail?

~~~
robryan
Have you used hotmail any time recently?

I had a hotmail from way back and was going to swap (only held back by the
lock in of my current email address being everywhere), but honestly now I
don't see much reason to. Hotmail web interface is close enough to the gmail
one now and windows live mail integrates nicely if your running and windows
machine.

~~~
dheerosaur
Yes, I have seen my friend using hotmail recently (on Windows). It is pretty
good.

~~~
vindice
It's really not very good at all.

1) The back button doesn't function as you'd like.

2) With Chrome as the browser at least, checking an item can result in all
other checked items being unchecked - this I think happens only after the
first AJAX postback.

3) Logging in takes you to a page other than the inbox - that's an unnecessary
additional click

4) The spam filter isn't a patch on Gmail's.

5) The search filtering has nothing on Gmail's

6) Because it uses .NET's AJAX methods as opposed to another model such as
jquery ajax + web services, all actions involve posting back the entire page
and therefore hotmail is much slower than gmail. (*This is an assumption based
on how slow hotmail is - I haven't checked in firebug).

7) Last time I checked you can't auto-forward mail.

All this said, I still use my ancient hotmail address whenever I need to post
an email address in public or give an email address to a company that's likely
to spam me. Perhaps it's the same with the article's poster.

Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above

~~~
MichaelGG
If you're referring to .NET's UpdatePanels, they do send the entire post data,
yes. But the response only contains required HTML to rerender that area.

ASP.NET can also take any "web service" (i.e., a bunch of function you define
and mark as directly callable via XML or whatever), and VS will generate
JavaScript proxy objects for it. Then you get lightweight calls (only send and
receive parameters and response), but get IntelliSense and stuff on them.

Hotmail might do something stupid and be slow. I don't know or care, but .NET
offers plenty of options.

