What technical book did you buy and read?

Question

I'm curious to understand what type of technical books are you still buying, and why.I personally do not buy books, prefer to listen to audiobooks and therefore less technical subjects. For work I primarily read papers and learn about new "stuff" (languages, tools) with online docs and manuals. I also never did a technical certification.It's a fact that the industry of technical books is in decline, and I'm sure there are opportunities to "refresh" it with new ideas and new styles of books. But before that, I was curious to understand what are people buying, are they actually consuming the content, what's the specific topic/use case.

layer8 · Accepted Answer

I&rsquo;m currently reading Olivier Dubuisson&rsquo;s ASN.1 &mdash; Communication Between Heterogeneous Systems. It&rsquo;s not very well written, even if you ignore that it&rsquo;s translated from French by a non-native English speaker. However, it&rsquo;s still better than John Larmouth&rsquo;s ASN.1 Complete. These are the only post-1994 books on ASN.1, and I can&rsquo;t help but think that the lack of good comprehensive material on ASN.1 contributed to it having only a relatively niche existence.

not_your_vase · Answer

Currently "Programming Massively Parallel Processors" (Hwu, Kirk, El Hajj). It is full of typos, but once I look over that, it has some quite educational techniques.
The next one waiting on the book shelf is "Compilers" (Lam, Ullman).
Why did I buy them? I found them at the flea market for almost nothing, unopened (different occasions). They were impulse buys.
Recently I also re-read "C++20 - The Complete Guide" (Josuttis), just as a reminder. But it was a PDF.

MilnerRoute · Answer

"But How Do It Know: The Basic Principles of Computing" was a good look at the 1's and 0's that underlie modern computing.http://www.buthowdoitknow.com/