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Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

569 points by debanjan16 ↗ HN
If you were to choose one book (or maybe more than one :P) to lure a curious person to your field of study, which will you choose?

For example: How to Design Programs for Computer Science.

Note: It has to be inviting for someone that knows nothing about the field but becomes hooked after reading it. Not some epitome which is revered by experts only.

282 comments

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beernet
Not exactly my field, but I think "Building a Storybrand" by Donald Miller is a great read for everyone dealing with creating products customers love.
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pxska
A very tough question. I feel that it might be quite hard to lure a curious person into Computer Science, who doesn't know anything about the field yet.

One of the books I liked (since I actually studied Linguistics in my Bachelor's) and what drew me towards CS was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.

worldmerge
I think maybe some of the history books could do it for cs. Like I'm very early into the book Crypto Anarchy, Cyber States and Pirate Utopias (2002 MIT PRESS), and it's kinda interesting. I'm not sure how the later parts are but chapter 1 is interesting. It definitely has an audience in mind but I think it could be an interesting book for someone outside of CS.
pjbeam
It stays interesting, or at least it did for me. A lot of the thoughts in there capture the spirit of reflection during a long since ended period of the Internet but there are some timeless ideas as well. Enjoy!
bakuninsbart
For me it was the german book "Das Chaos Computer Buch", which is basically a retelling of CCC shennanigans in the 80s. It has just the right mix of adventure, humour and technicality to get a 13 year old interested in hacking and computers.
ghostpepper
Another one like code but even more gentle is Understanding the Digital World by Brian Kernighan
inamiyar
This book was absolutely revolutionary for me
triyambakam
What about a book for Linguistics? I also studied Linguistics and now while I still find the knowledge useful (getting to describe to my son a voiced vs unvoiced plosive) I am not as interested in it anymore.
stuxnet79
Very interested in this. I'm currently learning a second language and my programmer brain keeps getting side tracked by _human language as an abstraction_ in and of itself. I'd be very interested in a basic intro to linguistics book that starts from first principles and goes through what grammar fundamentally is, syntax, morphology, etc.
estaseuropano
"don't sleep there are snakes" - half an adventure book, half linguistic analysis and explanation of a fairly unique language.
westoncb
For general linguistics I've enjoyed a couple small books by Frank Palmer: "Grammar" and "Semantics".
tikwidd
Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Chomsky and Berwick if you're interested in some of the deeper questions in linguistics. It's a bit heavy but aimed at a general technical audience.
muh_gradle
Code by Petzold is 100% my choice as well. It is an incredibly good book to describe not just code but computing and ultimately computing machines. I would give my 18 year old self Code and it would've done a very good job of piecing all the college courses that I would end up taking.
jeffreyrogers
I randomly picked Code off a library shelf when I was a child, not sure the exact age but probably 13 or earlier, and it drew me into programming.
Trex_Egg
The best book that I have read in the computer science.
rocgf
This was the book I thought of when I saw the title of this post.
aftergibson
This was the exact book I came to suggest. How I wish I’d been handed this in my first year of university and not the dry textbooks teaching the same thing but making it about a dozen times more difficult.
congoe
Lifespan by David Sinclair would be my recommendation if you want to energise someone for molecular biology/ biotech
folli
For me it was Dawkins' "the selfish gene" that drove me to biology. It's quite eye-opening how the simple rules of evolution result in this enormous diversity and complexity we see in nature.
porknubbins
Code by Charles Petzold then doing Nand to Tetris has given me an abiding (though amateur) fascination with computer architecture, which lead to building a 6502 machine and reading about lots of other architectures.
redwoolf
I came here to mention this book. I think it's a great introduction to how computers work and well written.
bennysomething
I went through the nand book too,it's amazing. What do you mean exactly by building a 6502 machine? In real hardware? You bought a 6502 and created a whole computer from other bits?
porknubbins
Yes in real hardware, though its a breadboard computer where the io is push buttons and an led array. So more a computer in the 70s hobbyist sense. I learned from Ben Eater’s youtube videos which are a good followup to nand to tetris.
Tomte
It is off-topic, insofar as it's not my field, but let me answer a dual question:

The Vital Question by Nick Lane made me think that were I to start over, be young and finish school, I'd study biology and biochemistry.

estaseuropano
If you haven't read it yet, pick up "Sex, Power Suicide" as well. Very dense reading but I learned something new or understood something I knew better from basically every page I read.
Issaclabs
Chaos by James gleick for multiple fields in physics
Tomte
Professor Sapolsky on Chaos (class on Human Biology/Biology of Behaviour):

  Chaos year after year after year in this class provokes the strongest opinions.
  
  A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it.
  
  About half the people never quite figure out what's up with it.
  
  And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They no longer have to meditate, they no longer have to have a—just they are at peace. At peace, I tell you.
  
  Because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology, taking apart a world of reductionism. For five hundred years we have all been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems, which is, if you want to understand something that's complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces.
  
  And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing. And what Chaos as an entire field is about—and this was pretty much the first book that was meant for the lay public about it—what Chaos shows is, that's how you fix clocks. That's not how you fix behaviors. That's not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock, behavior is like a cloud. And you don't understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together.
  
  So read through that book. A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological, so we'll just be suggesting the chapters you should read.
  
  I will tell you it is the first book since, like, Baby Beluga where I've gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front. Because, along with Baby Beluga, it's had the greatest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college. So that is a sign.
agucova
Sapolski's book (Behave) and his Stanford classes on YouTube are just awesome.
smcl
I loved the videos of his lectures on YouTube and I didn't know he wrote a book. Adding this to my queue and bumping it up near to the front :)
maybelsyrup
Robert Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic" for mental health / clinical psychology / psychiatry.
CyanBird
Kicking away the ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Industrial development and political economy, it really is a must read for anyone even mildly interested on the field, then you could go to Joan Robinson's criticism of Ricardian economics, but these are slightly more in depth topics

mdp2021
We should also add that

Ha-Joon Chang - Economics: The User's Guide

is a very, very good primer.

Trasmatta
I think Masters of Doom is a great book for getting people interested in either software development in general, or game development. Alternatively, some of the horror stories may actually turn them away. But every time I read it, I get excited about writing code again.
CamperBob2
Agreed, re: Masters of Doom. Given the inherent interest of the subject matter to its likely audience, that book was much better than it had to be.

Same is true for Steven Levy's Hackers.

anderspitman
I've read a lot of books and it definitely stands out. It's so inspiring as a programmer.
shrikant
I loved the book and the stories in it, but I did have your alternative experience: it put me off wanting to work in the games industry entirely!
zeta0134
My "field of study" is more like a hobby, but the definitive book is "Racing the Beam" by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort. If you're at all interested in retro game consoles and especially the clever tricks old programmers used to push these systems to their limits, it's an incredibly fun dive.
an-selm
Measurement/A mathematicians lament by Paul Lockhart. The first is not by any means very advanced/interesting mathematics per se, but it is written by somebody with an incredible passion for mathematics, which you can feel throughout the whole book, and which was totally novel for me coming from schoolish mathematics drudgery. Also, the way he approaches mathematics and teaching is quite interesting. Nothing for somebody who is already into mathematics, but as an entry point it is absolutely great. The second is a critique of school math, freely available online (https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/Lockharts...), that absolutely hits home on a lot of problems of math and school in general, but in a way that basically says "Look, its so cool, why are we ruining it? Lets do this better." which is much better than another bitter, destructive critique. And its well written and only twenty pages. Definitely recommend.
debanjan16
Measurement is good. But it would be better if the in-chapter questions had solutions to check.
anyfactor
Accounting...

The rule of accouting is that if anything excites you about accounting you shouldn't do accounting. The most fun I had studying accounting was learning about tax evasion, money laundering, defrauding stakeholders etc. Any academic book about forensic accounting could be deemed interesting if you just read only the case studies.

karambahh
What book on forensic accounting would you recommend for entertainment value?

I have some knowledge of french accounting, been exposed to US style, and thoroughly enjoyed long forms involving forensic accounting, money laundering and the like...

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HideousKojima
Not a book but CNBC's series "American Greed" is great. My favorite episode was about a guy who was (on paper) the second largest biodiesel producer in the country. He was literally just making up fake green energy credit numbers in a spreadsheet and selling them to companies looking to buy green energy credits.

The EPA was made aware of him but did nothing even after they physically inspected his biodiesel "factory" and discovered it was basically just an empty warehouse.

What finally brought him down was his taste for expensive sports cars and his being an asshole neighbor. He was always parking his sports cars pn the street, blocking school bus stops, etc. Local parents suspected he might be a drug dealer because of how many cars he had and how lavishly he spent his money, and they asked the local police to look into him. It was the local investigation that uncovered the fraud and brought him down.

https://advancedbiofuelsusa.info/rodney-hailey-sentenced-to-...

sumedh
> The EPA was made aware of him but did nothing

Did the EPA give any reason?

HideousKojima
It's been a while since I saw the episode, so I don't recall. Also it's entirely possible that the film crew deceptively edited things to make the EPA look worse, but it didn't seem that way to me when I watched it.
AlexCoventry
Harry Markopolos's No One Would Listen. A bit over the top in places, but entertaining.
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catominor
I really enjoyed Fooling Some of the People All of the Time by David Einhorn. He goes clearly and deeply into his suspicions about Allied Capital, a company that he thought/thinks had unethical/illegal accounting and business practices.
amelius
> The most fun I had studying accounting was learning about tax evasion, money laundering, defrauding stakeholders etc.

Sounds like hacking.

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I_complete_me
Finally, a question on HN I am "qualified" to answer. During my university education I came across Structures[1] by J.E. Gordon who, unlike me, was an aeronautical engineer but his take on structures really made so much sense to me, as a student of engineering, in a way that the fustian delivery of the professors at college did not. Some books stay with you for life - this one did for me.

[1] Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J.E. Gordon. Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245344.Structures

karaterobot
I can confirm that this book made me interested in "real" engineering (as in, engineering physical things in the real world rather than abstract symbols) when I read it. A bit too late for a career change, but I have talked to a few other people who hold this in high esteem as well. Good recommendation!
m_a_g
What makes you think those "abstract symbols" are not real?
renewiltord
Surely the fact that he put “real” in quote marks is sufficient to not have this tiresome argument.
leobg
It’s a favorite of Elon Musk. He has recommended it several times.
hencq
For Industrial Engineering or Operations Research, I'd say The Goal by Goldratt. An easy to read novel that leaves you looking at things differently.
aerovistae
It's not my field, but feels like an appropriate answer.

After the recent death of the myrmecologist EO Wilson, I decided to order a couple of his books and have spent the last few nights reading "Journey to the ants". It has been completely fascinating, I can't put it down.

imranq
"Fermat's Enigma" for Mathematics

"The Pleasure of Findings Things Out" for science

"How To Draw: Drawing And Sketching Objects And Environments From Your Imagination" for concept art / industrial design

luminadiffusion
Physics & Mathematics - Anyone who seriously pursues these fields learns to embrace the challenges as beautiful and the struggle to unravel their nature as fulfilling. To do this, we embrace the beauty in nature and see the connection with everything around us. Four books come to mind.

Physics:

1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman

2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Steven Hawking

Mathematics:

1. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by J.A. Paulos

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by D. Hofstadter

These books brilliantly illuminate the beauty in these fields. They show you that underneath all of that complex notation and "math speak" are beautiful ideas about life, the universe, and the nature of reality. These fueled me, even in to my PhD research. I still love them today.

debanjan16
Aha! GEB! Do you think a complete beginner with no knowledge in higher math should read GEB?
reducesuffering
GEB really doesn't have much complicated math. If you're willing to spend a bit of time thinking about the (logical) concepts presented, you should read it just fine.
wink
I actually thought of GEB and did a search over all comments because I thought it might be mentioned.

I'd love to hear a non-programmer/non-mathematician's take on it because I kinda didn't like it at all. I found it very elaborate and slow-developing with no real insight (maybe because the concepts weren't new or maybe because I'm more someone who prefers reading an encyclopaedia over watching a historically correct movie about something).

mdp2021
Gödel, Escher, Bach is an artistic appetizer over the stimulating world of structures, - not a manual.

They young mind is opened by being shown relations it did not yet see.

Read the extreme in that direction:

Italo Calvino - Le città invisibili

(which not only masterfully connects ideas, but most of the realm of existence and experience) - you should be able to see that principle at its apex. And there is no technical teaching: just an education to see the subtle.

armoredkitten
Non-mathematician here (psychologist now doing work in data science & machine learning). I was told this book had interesting insights about AI, consciousness, and the like. But I read it last year and found it the most tedious, absolutely unfocused book I've ever read.

Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person, a polymath. He clearly loves wordplay and classical music. But his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed out without cutting anything insightful. Gödel is important to the book. Escher...makes pictures that, if you squint real hard, could be construed as kind of relevant. Bach...well, the author just likes Bach and decided that he needed to be present. The latter two figures are essentially just used for some examples that could probably have been explained more clearly without using music as the context, given that it then requires him to delve into all the details about how fugues are different from canons, etc. etc.

Let's just say, reading the author's introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of the book states his main premises much more succinctly, to the point where you can skip the rest of the 700+ pages of the book.

nescioquid
> Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person...but his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed...

When you consider how much worth-while reading remains for each of us and how little time we have, I've come to think such prolix authors have bad manners of the self-indulgent kind.

mdp2021
> a complete beginner with no knowledge in higher math should read GEB

Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. A "spirit of mathematics" and a proficiency in the (practical) details of the discipline are very different things.

auslegung
Software engineering

- Steve Wozniak’s autobiography

- The Phoenix Project

- The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

Errancer
I would go with "Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical" by Lakatos, its a dialog-form history of defining Euler's formula and it shows the human side of mathematics as a science. I think its great as math has this unique status as providing with undoubtable knowledge but history shows that human error is possible even in this field.

Alternately "The Unreality of Time" by McTaggart, it has less than 20 pages and argues that time doesn't exist since it is logically incoherent.

Not sure if this would get someone hooked up but for me those two were extremely fun reads.

EDIT: Just to be clear – both are meant as philosophy books, even if they touch on other things. :)

spindle
I second Lakatos, but more general introductions to philosophy that I always recommend are

Simon Blackburn: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (not intended as an introduction but IMO it makes a really fun introduction)

Thomas Nagel: What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy

cartucho1
Philosopher here as well. I'd strongly recommend Thomas Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution". It's a beautiful book that shows how ancient astronomy, cosmology and philosophy were interwoven, with valuable lessons for how science works even today.

From the classics I'd also recommend Hume. The "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" is short, very well written and argues, among other things, that causality is an illusion :)

mdp2021
> Proofs and Refutations - The Logic of Mathematical Discovery

Do not, do not miss the transcripts of the lessons held by Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics (LSE), "Lectures on Scientific Method" - available in

-- Motterlini, Matteo (ed.), For and Against Method, including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence (1999), Chicago: University of Chicago Press

unnah
The Lakatos book is a great introduction to mathematical thinking in that it shows the importance of definitions - how even simple definitions are malleable and can be changed to properly handle special cases. All the details are discussed in human-readable prose without formulas more complicated than simple addition.
rsfern
Materials Science: Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik

https://archive.org/details/StuffMatters

Very accessible and fun to read, and the book is structured around introducing a lot of fundamental materials science concepts in the context of everyday objects (silverware, chocolate, etc)

halo
There was a 3-part BBC TV series by the author called "How It Works" which convered essentially the same material which I far preferred to the book - I don't have a stream link, unfortunately.
ajot
I would say Geoff Rayner-Canham's "Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry". It is obviously a university level teaching book, but I find it very appealing and not really hard to grasp. It made me fall in love with chemical processes and some material science concepts.
2bitlobster
Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. I used it for years as a required text in pretty much every UX related class I taught. Entertaining, super digestable and very nutritious.
karaterobot
I expected to see this one or "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. I don't know a designer who hasn't read one or both.
carlmr
I'm not a designer, but I found TDoET immensely helpful in terms of designing software interfaces, be it APIs or GUIs.

It really teaches a few simple concepts that apply in wide ranging areas.

kriro
It taught me to smile whenever I see a door or use a faucet. One of the great gems that I picked up on a complete whim.

This "Don't Make me Think" which the parent suggested and "About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design" are my "UXy" books on the shelve.