Books, papers, articles… anything you deem interesting. In my case, I just finished Thinking in Systems. I will probably pick my next reading from your suggestions.
Books, papers, articles… anything you deem interesting. In my case, I just finished Thinking in Systems. I will probably pick my next reading from your suggestions.
I finished The Martian last night. It’s an amazing book. It’s sci-fi, but with enough realism in it to make is sound plausible. The stranded man is an engineer, so there are many detailed descriptions of how he fits things together to make new things he needs.
Read this last week, only took a few hours as it pulled me right in. Fantastic book, excited for the movie; though I’m a bit weirded out that Dr. Mann is going to be stranded on Mars..
I’m excited to start it; it’s next on my (ever-growing) list after I finish Infinite Jest.
How is the writing itself? I’ve heard great things about the realism in the sci-fi, but not much about the story or prose outside of the technical details.
The writing is good. It’s compelling. The author explains things clearly and pretty much every chapter ends on a cliffhanger.
There’s for sure sections of the book that read like a really interesting spreadsheet…but it doesn’t fall into that pit of genre fiction where they spend too much time on genre and not enough time on solid writing. It’s good.
I’d recommend Rocket Girls for something vaguely similar. Also the nonfiction Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth.
Finished reading Neuromancer a couple of days ago, it was an experience to read but I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the events of the book.
Stared reading Cryptonomicon by William Gibson yesterday and I’m loving it so far.
I’ve read Cryptonomicon like 5 years ago or so – such a great book. Thanks for reminding, I think it’s time to read it again.
Cryptonomicon is Neal Stephenson. Very good imho.
By coincidence, I’ve been rereading some of the cyberpunk stuff lately, a lot of it seems silly in retrospect but some of it we’re living in ?
Also check out Charles Stross’s Accelerando …
I recently purchased the book form of the CIA Torture Report and have been slowly reading that: http://www.amazon.com/Senate-Intelligence-Committee-Report-Torture/dp/1612194850
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. I purchased a copy a while ago after a friend recommended it, but it’s been sitting unopened on my shelf for months. I’m doing a small amount of travel at the moment so figured it’d be a good time to get through the backlog. So far a very enjoyable look into that period of history, and the people who put the internet together.
this is one of my two favourite history-of-tech books! lost count of how many copies i’ve given out as gifts. the other is “dealers of lightning”, which i highly recommend if you haven’t read it yet.
I’m reading (well, listening to while doing chores) Nexus by Ramez Naam. It’s sci-fi about a transhumanist future (and the resulting implications). The author used to work at Microsoft, which was what initially piqued my interest. I’m not very far into it, but it seems like it might have some interesting ideas.
I’m reading something fun this week: Queen of Fire by Anthony Ryan. It’s the third, and final, book in a fantasy series called Raven’s Shadow.
Poland by James A Michener. It’s an interesting, fictional approach to teaching Polish history.
I just started reading “Purely Functional Data Structures” by Chris Okasaki after watching an amazing talk about HMATs from EuroClojure'15.
I’m reading “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Revised and Updated”. It’s about the cognitive aspect of mathematics. It’s runs along the same vein as “Where Mathematics Comes From” (Lakoff, Nunez) and “Ad Infinitum” (Rotman). I’d love to hear if there are other books on the cognitive aspect of mathematics.
Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, fun sci-fi.
Still cranking on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
More Info on this unfalsifiable, but nonetheless fascinating, theory.
The Annihilation Score hopped the queue because I’m a sucker for the Laundry Files series. After that, I’m going to sit down and read the Aho-Corasick paper because I’ve wanted to try my hand at implementing that for a while.
Love that series, it’s on my queue to read.
I am reading Ready Player One and just finished Ansible Configuration Management - Second Edition.
Been on a Bird kick as of late. Currently reading Algebra of Programming as well as Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design.
Started Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile today. Only just finished the prologue; early polling suggests I don’t like his style, but the ideas are interesting and he seems to have some creds, so I’m waiting to see what he does with it. Just finished Michael Lewis’s The Big Short about the CDS/CDO/subprime shitshow; it’s kind of a finance-context human-interest potboiler, but actually works really well, given that that context seems to be full of … well, humans that are interested in causing that scale of fuck-up through their actions. Page-turning writing, if you’re broadly interested but don’t already know the ins and outs, and the characters at the heart of the story are the sceptics who shorted the banks, so it has a kind of underdog oomph to it. Also on the side-simmer is Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia which appeals to me in principle, is definitely interesting and has held me for a few chapters but hasn’t had me racing to finish it yet. Next up: Owen Jones; The Establishment, and then in the fourth episode of my “Authors With Second Names Ending In S” series, State of the Art, Iain Banks’s Culture #4. Oh and breaking the cycle, Piketty’s still standing on the shelf looming over me every time I walk past - but let’s be honest, it’s not going to happen any time soon.
I plan on reading Redshirts this week.
I’ve been making my way through Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book (free epub/mobi) in an attempt to learn a bit more about graphics programming. It covers a lot of the fascinating advancements in graphics during his tenure at id Software, but it’s not the most pragmatic read for modern graphics programming.
It’s a tough book, but a lot of fun. I think the reason why it’s not completely graphics oriented is because the first part was taken from his other book “The Zen of Code Optimization”. Later on in the book it focuses on graphics programming.
Yea I started reading kinda from the middle, around the BSP section, but now I’m branching back out. It’s growing on me.
If you’re interested in going further down the optimisation rabbit hole, have a look at “Code Optimization: Effective Memory Usage” by Kris Kaspersky. But if you’re more interested in graphics programming, I’ve found that games programming books go into more detail rather than graphics alone… depends on what you’re after.
Although I loved using Turbo Debugger in a past life, most of time I’ve been more of a “print sprinkler”. Now that I’m playing with Rust (as opposed to Perl), I figured now would be the best time to learn my way around GDB. Started reading “The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse” in the past week and so far so good. With the book open in front of me, I almost feel comfortable in gdb.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
Just finished Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell by Brandon Sanderson. The title is unwieldy, but the novella itself is a good tight fantasy story.
Slowly working through Programming Distributed Computing Systems (only on the chapter 3 exercises at the moment) and The Cross Of Redemption. Really enjoying both so far.