HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's the "one book" in your discipline?

30 points by pstanger ↗ HN
Today in the post about mid-level backend engineering courses, someone offered "just buy this book" (Designing Data-Intensive Applications) and other commenters echoed support for the book. A few weeks ago in a thread about ML someone commented to the effect of "Everything you need to know in ML is in this book" (Deep Learning with Python) and again people chimed in supporting it. Maybe those two examples are actually off base, but I love the idea of the "one book" where you can get a decently complete picture of a given subject and level of expertise. So HN, what's your discipline and "one book"?

17 comments

[ 1240 ms ] story [ 2428 ms ] thread
BMc2020
Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering, Henry W. Ott
teppic
k&r
horeszko
The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie for those who don't know
dyingkneepad
Is this like a bootleg "for dummies" series?
in9
Statistical Inference Berger and Casella. There are better options, but the exercises and notataion are fun.
horeszko
Factory Physics - Hopp, Spearman

Great book on manufacturing operations management that I consider to be one of the best technical books on the subject.

solardev
Frontend dev, and the others I've met seem to just read a few pages on MDN and Stack and wing it from there, lol. I wish there was a good book on the engineering side of it. The UX side of it has a few good titles, but the dev side is pretty messy.
austin-cheney
There is: DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith.

https://www.amazon.com/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docum...

But, nobody will read it. Tree models irrationally scare the shit out of most developers. Most people would rather cut off an arm and work 10x harder for less money than navigate a tree. It’s super weird.

However, if you are a person who isn’t autistically riddled with fears you lie to yourself about understanding the DOM opens almost all doors on the frontend, such as: accessibility, SEO, A/B testing, test automation, performance, and writing durable code quickly without need for a framework.

solardev
I couldn't find a preview for the 2nd edition, but the 1st edition seemed quite out of date?

The frontend work I tend to be dealing with at this point in my career usually involve proper web "apps" (dashboards, visualizations, editors, etc) rather than the web "pages" that the DOM was well suited for. The main difference is the need for client-side state and realtime interactivity that doesn't need a full backend rerender every time. Yes you can write all that in plain JS but at some level of complexity you'd just be reinventing your own framework.

What I'd like to see isn't so much getting rid of all the frameworks in favor of vanillajs (unless ecma improves it dramatically), but a good guide on how to integrate the various pieces of modern frameworks in a neat and maintainable way. I'm not sure that it's really doable right now given the pace of change and how quickly everything becomes obsolete. Clean Code has some interesting ideas but isn't exactly a drop in fit to the JS ecosystem.

Anyway, just thinking out loud...

austin-cheney
Think about it like this: Proper web apps means SPA, which means some giant stupid framework (Angular, React, Vue). These frameworks solve only two problems: architecture in a box and putting text on screen. They really don’t do anything else. That is why most frontend developers can’t do anything else.

The compile target of the browser is the DOM. This is just as true now as it was in 1998. If you want to do more than put text on screen you need to dive deeper. Your giant framework won’t/can’t give you that.

dstala
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Great book to understand Human evolution

fakecrusade
Designing Data Intensive Applications, changed my career
jjice
I don't think I could ever pick a single book, but Clean Architecture by Robert Martin is a favorite of mine. Really helped shape the design of testable systems for me. Once I actually started writing automated tests for my code, it turns out things broke in production a lot less, who would have thought? I don't like what is probably his most popular book, Clean Code, though.
Glant
Chocolates & Confections by Peter P. Greweling. It's full of recipes, but more importantly there are large sections of information about how the cooking process actually works, how each ingredient effects the end result, why things like excess humidity can cause things to not set, etc.
mikewarot
The bible of machinists everywhere is Machinery's Handbook[1]

I've got an old copy, but they tend to remain useful for generations, as the basics really don't change very often. When you've got to make a bevel gear, and all you have is involute cutters, they've got the formula and details to get an acceptable one-off.

If you're cutting an ACME thread, they've got it covered, etc.

If you want to see for yourself, you can borrow a copy from the Internet Archive[2]

[1] https://books.industrialpress.com/machinery-handbook/

[2] https://archive.org/search?query=+Machinery%27s+Handbook

max_
Neufert, The Architects Data.