HACKER Q&A
📣 badrabbit

Best technical books you've read so far?


HN,

There was a recent post about best books you've read in 2022. I am not a book-person, I don't read fiction. Even technical books I don't care much for them except once in a while I pick up a really good book that goes really in-depth into a topic giving me all kinds of insights and that book I can't put down!

Not just in 2022, but what are the top technical books that are similar that you have read?


  👤 MilnerRoute Accepted Answer ✓
Here's a book I really enjoyed. "But How Do It Know? - The Basic Principles of Computers for Everyone."

It's a surprisingly accessible, plain-English explanation of... logic gates. Exactly how it is that so many programming tricks are derived from simple binary numbers.

At some point it occurred to me that specific functions exist in programming languages solely because they map onto things that can be easily accomplished with the underlying circuitry...


👤 diffu5e
Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People by Aditya Bhargava is a fun and very approachable walkthrough of some common algorithms. With the illustrations it reads smoothly and isn't dry like a normal algorithm book.

👤 cafard
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessey and Patterson.

Transaction Processing: Principles and Techniques by Gray and Reuter.