Ask HN: Good books/resources that provide overviews of large industries?

- Corporate Real estate / Office leasing, book: “The Essential Guide to Corporate Real Estate”

http://www.corenetglobal.org/mycorenetglobal/tcontent.aspx?I...

Startups/Companies looking at the corporate/office occupier market, i.e. WeWork, VTS, etc

I've personally read the "Box: How the shipping container..." book. Its a pretty good read, it talks about the history of caravel ships's cargo load eventually turning into standarized freight containers. It talks about how pulley systems eventually turn into cranes used in ports. And the logistics of extracting freight inside of the hull of a ship (system is like a claw machine in an arcade). It gaves you the history of how the box came to be, by solving issues every shipper faced.

As to things related to distribution logistics, my favorite is anything from the national association of distributors. I've read 1 or 2 books there, the content there is topnotch https://www.naw.org/. Its got some good very specific applicable MBA-level topics on there, such as pricing schemas and optimizations.

Ecommerce books I really don't see the point. This is an evolving field. Your exposed to ecommerce best practices everyday. My favorite go to has always been things like mcmastercarr.com, amazon, and a few private-based companies. The recommended read for ecommerce is the amazon book for something that's more of a narrative. As a side note, analyzing ecommerce sites is also how I learned a lot of best practices for UX, frontend design, and marketing (just fire up the debugger, you'd be surprised how different companies do frontend in different ways).

Private labelling & importing I've read a few. I found this one to be helpful when I first started private labelling https://www.amazon.com/Bible-complete-beginners-successful-i... , it talks about chinese culture and negotiation tactics

Fintech I am not really up to date on so I couldn't really tell you.

Logistics - I think this is something best learned by experience. But, the recommended standard text is this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0989490602/ref=oh_aui_sear.... I've read bits and pieces here and there, its more of a reference manual.

Hardware - A really good book I've read is called "Code: the hidden language" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JDMPOK2/ref=oh_aui_sear.... It talks about how software integrates with hardware, to understanding how morse code, the decimal system was created, and leading up to flipflop gates / and embedded processing. First half of book is readable by anyone, 2nd half requires a CS degree to understand

Database design schemas - I have a few of these books, I personally prefer anything from kimball group here. https://www.amazon.com/Data-Warehouse-Toolkit-Definitive-Dim.... Airtable has some really great database design schema blog posts as well, including case studies from WeWork.

Finally as a side note, depending on the industry, you might find better youtube channels over book content, better content on private sites / blogs, or better content on reddit forums.

One of the best ways of learning an industry is to find what the standard software is used. You can find it in a google search usually. Just pretend you own a company in the industry. What would you search up? Find the top 2 or 3 softwares used in that industry...

On the general "Creativity" industry (with a focus on animation, but it applies to many similar ones): https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Insp...

Written by the president of Pixar, and contains many anecdotes about Pixar, and challenges of animation and general creative work.

The prize by daniel yergin for oil and gas. Simply awesome. Bettwr yet watch the 8 part youtube documentary

Several relevant books here: https://rootsofprogress.org/bibliography

More history than overview of current state though.

One of my favorite mental models for an entire industry (quant finance):

"'P' Versus 'Q': Differences and Commonalities between the Two Areas of Quantitative Finance"

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1717163

Summary: Quantitative Finance comes down to two tasks: "model the future" (P world) or "extrapolate the present" (Q world).

I went through this process a while ago. Everything from books on Casino management (fascinating topic), a skyscraper building company, running a private university, and the perfume industry. I’ve got hundreds of books titles I can give you that aren’t reasonable to type here. PM me for more info.

Best general advice I can give you is to go https://thriftbooks.com. A better selection than Amazon at prices 70% less (assuming the books you’re buying are at least a couple of years old).

Just start typing in random names of topics (or industries) you’re interested in and go crazy.

I’ve bought about 3,000 hardcover books from them with an average price of $3.50 (and that’s including tax and shipping).

The best sources are working experts in the field. Getting someone to answer your questions could potentially save you months/years of reading books (and give you insights you won't find in books). The problem is, of course, how to find those people that are willing to talk to you. I wish someone would solve that! I'd be happy to pay for that kind of service.