Book Notes

These files contain notes on non-fiction technical books that I've read or am reading, including some personal thoughts and notes about related topics.

The goal of this is drifting over time, but I would like to accomplish the following:

• Capture and reinforce my learning
• Discover and highlight good books
• Focus my study efforts on things I enjoy and that matter to me
• Provide a somewhat searchable body of text to find books by topic

Indexes

To peruse the entire list of books, look to the by subject page.

For a smaller subset, check out the learning paths.

Aggregation Pages

The best stuff gets aggregated:

• Lexicon
• Motivation

This is very much a work in progress.

Favourites

Top Books

The following books are ones that I especially like:

1. The Psychology of Computer Programming (Gerald Weinberg, 1971, Van Nostrand Reinhold)
2. Land of Lisp (Conrad Barski, 2011, No Starch)
3. Lean Software Development (Poppendieck, 2003, Addison-Wesley)
4. The Elements of Computing Systems (Noam Nisan, Shimon Schocken, 2005, MIT Press)
5. Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, and Kim, 2018, IT Revolution)
6. Absolute FreeBSD (Michael Lucas, 2007, No Starch)

Favourites By Subject

A loosely curated selection of books. For the full list, see the by subject page.

Teamwork & Management

• The Psychology of Computer Programming (Gerald Weinberg, 1971, Van Nostrand Reinhold)
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Daniel Pink, 2009, Riverhead Books)
• The Manager's Path (Camille Fournier, 2017, O'Reilly)
• Radical Candor (Kim Scott, 2017, Pan Macmillen)
• Lean Software Development (Poppendieck, 2003, Addison-Wesley)
• Kanban in Action (Joakim Sundén, Marcus Hammarberg, 2014, Manning)
• Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, and Kim, 2018, IT Revolution)

Software Development

• Refactoring (Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, 1999, Addison-Wesley)
• Game Programming Patterns (Robert Nystrom, 2011, Genever Benning)
• Building Microservices (Sam Newman, 2015, O'Reilly)

Computing Science

• Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Ted Nelson, 1974, self-published)
• Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (Niklaus Wirth, 1976, Prentice-Hall)
• The Turing Omnibus (Alexander Dewdney, 1989)
• The Art of the Metaobject Protocol (Daniel Bobrow, Gregor Kiczales, 1991, MIT Press)
• Applied Cryptography (Bruce Schneier, 1993, Wiley)
• Hacker's Delight (Henry S. Warren Jr., 2002, Addison-Wesley)
• The Elements of Computing Systems (Noam Nisan, Shimon Schocken, 2005, MIT Press)

Data

• Visualize This (Nathan Yau, 2011, Wiley)
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann, 2017, O'Reilly)
• A Curious Moon (Rob Conery, 2017, Big Machine)

Operations & Infrastructure

• Release It! (Michael Nygard, 2007, Pragmatic Bookshelf)
• Absolute FreeBSD (Michael Lucas, 2007, No Starch)
• Twisted: Network Programming Essentials (Jessica McKellar, Abe Fettig, 2013, O'Reilly)
• Networking for Systems Administrators (Michael Lucas, 2015, Tilted Windmill)
• SSH Mastery (Michael Lucas, 2018, Tilted Windmill)
• Building Microservices (Sam Newman, 2015, O'Reilly)
• REST in Practice (Savas Parastatidis, Jim Webber, and Ian Robinson, 2010, O'Reilly)
• RESTful Web APIs (Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby, and Mike Amundsen, 2013, O'Reilly)
• Secure Your Node.js Web Application (Karl Duuna, 2015, Pragmatic Bookshelf)
• Microservices in .NET Core (Christian Gammelgaard, 2017, Manning)
• Designing Web APIs (Amir Shevat, Brenda Jin, and Saurabh Sahni, 2018, O'Reilly)
• Node.js 8 The Right Way (Jim Wilson, 2018, Pragmatic Bookshelf)

Programming Languages

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Gerald Sussman, Hal Abelson, 1979, MIT Press)
• The C Programming Language (Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, 1978, Prentice Hall)
• Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence (Ivan Bratko, 1986, Addison-Wesley)
• The Scheme Programming Language (R. Kent Dybvig, 1987, MIT Press)
• Effective C++ (Scott Meyers, 1992, Addison-Wesley)
• Practical Common Lisp (Peter Seibel, 2005, Apress)
• Higher Order Perl (Mark Dominus, 2005, Morgan Kaufmann)
• C# in Depth (Jon Skeet, 2008, Manning)
• JavaScript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford, 2008, O'Reilly)
• Land of Lisp (Conrad Barski, 2011, No Starch)
• Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! (Miran Lipovača, 2011, No Starch)
• Ruby Under a Microscope (Pat Shaughnessy, 2013, No Starch)
• Realm of Racket (Matthias Felleisen, Conrad Barski, David Van Horn, 2013, No Starch)
• The Book of F# (Dave Fancher, 2014, No Starch)
• Domain Modeling Made Functional (Scott Wlaschin, 2018, Pragmatic Bookshelf)
• Classic Computer Science Problems in Python (David Kopec, 2019, Manning)
• Serious Python (Julien Danjou, 2019, No Starch)
• Thinking With Types (Sandy Maguire, 2019, Leanpub)

Hardware

• Build Your Own Z80 Computer (Steve Ciarcia, 1981, McGraw-Hill)
• Hacking the Xbox (Andrew Huang, 2003, No Starch)

Backlog

Stop starting, start finishing.

• Game Programming Patterns (Robert Nystrom, 2011, Genever Benning)
• The Psychology of Computer Programming (Gerald Weinberg, 1971, Van Nostrand Reinhold)
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann, 2017, O'Reilly)
• Algebra-Driven Design (Sandy Meguire, 2020, Leanpub)
• Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms (James Coplien, 1992, AT&T Bell Labs)
• API Security in Action (Neil Madden, 2020, Manning)
• Resilient Management (Lara Hogan, 2019, A Book Apart)
• Realm of Racket (Matthias Felleisen, Conrad Barski, David Van Horn, 2013, No Starch)
• Domain-Driven Design Distilled (Vaughn Vernon, 2016, Addison-Wesley)
• Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman Method (Emily Bache, 2020, Leanpub)
• Thinking With Types (Sandy Maguire, 2019, Leanpub)
• Designing Web APIs (Amir Shevat, Brenda Jin, and Saurabh Sahni, 2018, O'Reilly)
• A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game (Jeff Sutherland, Jim Coplien, 2019, Pragmatic Bookshelf)
• Programming Sound with Pure Data (Tony Hillerson, 2014, Pragmatic Bookshelf)