Ask HN: What are the best tech books you read in 2021?

95 points by hintymad ↗ HN
Mine are Statistical Inference in Computer Age, and Transactional Information Systems. Curious what other books teach us powerful concepts and tools that carry us a long way

32 comments

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Writing High Performance .Net Code by Ben Watson
Worth the read?
Why?
The thread is titled “Ask HN: What are the best tech books you read in 2021?”

Why would someone post a book that they didn’t consider worth reading?

Designing Distributed Control Systems
This seems like a fascinating book. What work/interest led you to reading such a book?
Seems an interesting book. How is it compared to other books about distributed systems?
Is this the one? - Designing Distributed Control Systems: A Pattern Language Approach

Can you provide a short summary please ?

Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom
Can't wait for this. I'm still on his 'patterns' book. He's such a good author.
But how Do it Know? The Basic Principles of Computers for Everyone - J. Clarke Scott.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
This is indeed a great book.
I am on frontend ATM but still learned a lot that is applicable from this book.
I've seen the book is available on audible. Do you think it's possible to benefit from the audiobook?
I'd imagine the audiobook wouldn't be as good as the paper version of this book because:

- I find I often want to go back to earlier sections, to review a concept that's relevant to the current part, and

- Much of the information has structure that's hard to keep straight without pages and text formatting

i see quite a bit of overlap between the book and his lecture series on distributed systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc...

These lectures give a more theory based approach, while the book is more based on discussing practical systems; now both are covering distributed systems as such.

Now the distributed system audio course on youtube is extremely accessible (i listened to them while taking walks with our dog)

The book is also great, Kleppmann is writing in a very accessible style.

Likely not, it's a book that relies on the visual representations of how things are laid out a bit too often.

What that means in practical terms is that you'll be presented with diagrams and need to pause and think what they really mean.

This context will likely not be translated well in the audio form.

its a tough book, i had to read some of the later chapters many times but it definitely expanded made me a better engineer
This and Database Internals. I'm more of a sales engineer that continues to flirt with moving to engineering full-time. These two books have really opened my eyes to both better system design and implementation details.
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andy Hunt
Haven't finished reading it yet, but it's been enlightening and thought-provoking: "The Essence of Software" by Daniel Jackson.
Team Topologies: Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow.
Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface (2nd Edition) by David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy