Seconding "How to Win Friends and Influence People". Took me a while to read it because the title was a big turn-off, but it's not as manipulative as it sounds. The audio book is great if you commute to work. Sometimes I would listen to a chapter on the way to work and then apply the lesson that very same day. Amazing. It will change the way you think about your interactions with other people.
Another book I love, in a similar category, is "Crucial Conversations". Very useful for improving your communication skills in work and personal life.
Also, "Strengths Finder 2.0". It will tell you what superpowers you already have.
I also second "How to Win Friends and Influence People". I'm just about to start another iteration of re-reading it. I know I still have a lot to work on, but I have already changed things in my life for better thanks to it. The best recommendation I read so far was on LessWrong. To quote,
"An excellent collection of the deeper and most subtle forms of this practice of this sort can be found in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, one of the only self-help books I've read that was truly useful and not a regurgitation of cliches and applause lights. Carnegie's thesis is basically that being nice is the most powerful of the Dark Arts, and that a master of the Art of Niceness can use it to take over the world. It works better than you'd think."
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath discusses how to make a message memorable. It's changed the way I communicate - I use its principles on an almost-daily basis.
The 4-Hour Chef is probably not a surprising choice since it's a recent release and Amazon has been pushing it heavily (Amazon are also the publisher). I'm just over 60% through the book so I don't want to give it a ringing endorsement just yet but it fits the category of "developing a new superpower" quite nicely and it's definitely worth a particular mention on HN for two reasons.
1. Ferriss, the author, is very much a hacker in his approach to trying new things and drawing conclusions. This is also very evident in his previous book, The 4-Hour Body.
2. The 4-Hour Chef not only teaches the reader how to cook (which is a superpower in itself). He also delves into the _meta_ and spends a large portion of the book, discussing the framework he uses for learning these techniques and how he has applied it to learning (and excelling in) other skill sets like judo, tango dancing and learning new languages.
Edit: This sounds like a bit of a marketing message, which it definitely is not, so I'll add a negative.
I find his books to be a bit scattered and although they're centered on an over-arching theme he doesn't always tie the threads together very convincingly. Whole chapters can seem like lightly-edited crib notes. Personally, I don't mind this style of writing and it does make his books very easy to scan and skip chapters without losing the books narrative but at times I've also found it difficult to follow.
I would have to agree with you on the disorganization part. I read the 4-Hour Body and that felt like a magazine in the way that it skipped over different subjects and areas of the body at different parts of the book.
This is a function of the way he writes the book. If you read four-hour work week he basically describes his process, which is that he develops the headline structure for the book and each chapter and then outsources the actual writing online via elance or equivalent. Presumably the writers read a bunch of stuff on the topic and essentially write crib notes. Quite a clever way for Ferris to make money, but not the highest quality product.
I agree with that reading Ferriss could change your life and the way you think about learning, earning money and taking care of your body. I don't think, however, that 4-Hour Chef is really a life changing book. 4HWW definitely is, at least it changed my life.
I recommend The Way of the Superior Man (http://www.amazon.com/Way-Superior-Man-Spiritual-Challenges/...). My roommate lent it to me after an ugly breakup. The title is a little silly (I certainly wouldn't describe myself as "spiritual") and I don't agree with every word of it, but after reading this book I finally felt like I understood women and relationships, and I met my now-wife a few months after reading it. I doubt I would have gotten her without it.
I've just read half of it & I'll probably end up finishing it because it's so interesting. But I really dislike the implication that leadership skills (purpose, reliability, equanimity) are intrinsically male, while childishness is intrinsically female. At least now I know what type of women to avoid.
It is a bit more complicated than that, which doesn't become clear in Way of the Superior Man. I read almost all of Deida's books and liked them a lot, but they all have the downside of too much spiritual babble and being a bit too abstract like "giving your deepest gift". What does that even mean?
Thing is - and this becomes more clear in his other books - men and women both have similar skills, but both have a TENDENCY to feel more comfortable in a specific skill set.
So, on the one hand I love Deida's advice. It is oftentimes on the spot. Very clear and even actionable at times. But on the other hand, it oftentimes is also too abstract, too simple, or too black-and-white. It almost feels like he's describing his favorite action movie star and if you read it that way, you can get the impression that he describes film heroes (super clear purpose, cannot be distracted, live on your edge). While a film hero can be an inspiration, it is oftentimes still a heavily simplified character.
1. I read a few titles and thought "Hmm, I'll go and buy a few of these on Amazon."
2. Then I thought: "I already have some of these books that I never read, I could gift them to others."
3. Perhaps I could set up some sort of book exchange where HN users can share books.
4. It would barely be worth the hassle and cost of postage.
5. Couldn't we share digital copies and avoid the postage?
6. That's PIRACY. The idea is dead.
It seems to me that a future where books cost a maximum of $2.99 is inevitable. I would unhesitatingly have bought 10 of these books, and there'd be almost no point in 'pirating' them, or even in sharing physical copies.
paperbackswap.com is a decent book exchange. The major advantage is not that you save money on books, but that you can find a lot of obscure older books.
Talk about a blast from the past, my dad used to read all those Mack Bolan books. :) I swear there was one where he was on a tractor shooting someone on the cover...
Talk about a blast from the past, I used to read all those Mack Bolan books. Back in the 80's / early 90's, I devoured those things. Haven't seen or read one in years now though. It might be fun to go back and re-read some of them.
A good book on piracy from a cultural and business perspective is The Pirate's Dilemma. It used to be "pay what you want" but the payment system seems broken.
Fear not, Ben Franklin already went down this thought path. An old fashioned library will stock most of these titles, and might order the others on request.
I'm fortunate enough to live in a city where the library does home delivery ("It's like amazon, but without the money"). Having to physically return the books can be daunting, but it's a small price to pay for eclectic reading habits with no buyer's remorse. I'd recommend that more people look into using the local library. Now that all of my books are free, I have more reading to do than I have time.
I've never heard of a public library offering delivery. Could you tell us where you live? Will they take back the old books if they are delivering new?
There is a surprisingly large amount of bookwarez out there. I pretty much buy on amazon (kindle), but if it isn't available on kindle, bookwarez seems the easiest way to get an ebook.
I have bought a bunch of Audible audiobooks too, but their DRM is so annoying that I rip them to mp3, and if I can bookwarez the audiobook, would just do that to avoid wasting 3h running the conversion and encoding.
Wow, two recommendations for Starting Strength on HN in one week. I have already taken started incorporating the advice at the gym and it seems barbells might be my friend after all.
The Easy Way to Stop Smoking worked for me 7 years ago and I can't recommend it enough. I'll never forget scanning the table of contents and flipping to chapter 21, it sold me on the book.
I've started Drawing on the right Side of the Brain, which is basically self paced training. Really insightful so far.
I've really gone down the rabbit hole with barbell lifting in the past year. Yes, read starting strength, and also practical programming for strength training (rip's other big book). Read Fit, which Kilgore contributed to, and then find some good blogs (I recommend 70sbig).
Barbell lifting can be the nerdiest way to work out.
Haven't even gotten through the Vol 1 and it changed the life. However, the change is gradual and when you're into it for long enough it gets hard to look at times before TAOP retrospectively. To take on it all is way beyond that time.
There's been a lot of pseudo-scientific bullshit spewed about porn and masturbation by people looking to justify their moralising, and frankly from the summary I can't see how that book's going to be any different.
I think you would first need to define what a super power is in this world today. Then find the most effective book in that area. I feel the super power of today is the ability to sell because money is one of the most important raw materials from which power is created. Or you could be selling a vision if you are one of those "money is the root of all evil" types. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good book on selling. ;)
The book that has changed my life the most, so far, has been The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman.
In 2010 I started a job that was far, far ahead of my skillset. I'd written fewer than 10,000 lines of code in my life, and I was completely ill-prepared for the work I was supposed to be doing. I picked up SICP about a month or two into that job.
Fast forward a year, and I felt that I knew more about programming than half the people I worked with, and I'd moved to a smaller, more awesome company doing work that I think is much more fun.
A year since then and I've picked up half a dozen new languages, given talks at user groups on some of them. Next year I'm aiming for conferences.
Interestingly, the book jokingly uses sorcery as an ongoing analogy for computing. Programs and algorithms are "spells," computational processes are "spirits" which are conjured and controlled by spells, programming languages are the arcane symbols and runes wizards use to compose their spells, and software bugs are the flawed spells which novice sorcerers often cast (sometimes with disastrous consequences).
This is exactly what gets me through my chemistry classes.
It's pretty ridiculous, but I think it puts the person back into the comfortable mindset of control. Rather than learning a big, scary thing that is beyond you, you are merely manipulating the world with your powers to accomplish tasks. For whatever reason, that paradigm is more intuitive for certain people.
I keep promising/threatening to make up business cards with the title "Angel Choreographer". I don't just know how many can dance on the head of a pin, I direct their steps on a regular basis.
This book won't make you into a wizard like the one you see on the cover. What it will do is open your eyes.
I mean, it teaches scheme for Pete's sake. Playing Devil's advocate here, who honestly uses that in pratcital everyday systems? Nobody reads the book and immediately goes "Wow! Now that I learned Scheme, which is totally the best language, I'll use my Scheme powers to create the coolest software in the world!"
The reason why this book is so cherished is because it treats scheme as a building block for implementing the most interesting ideas and patterns from systems you use every day.
Rusty on recursion? That's chapter one. You'll be thinking with recursion and will understand most of its implications by the first few dozen pages.
Think you know about OO? Build your own object-orientation system in Chapter 2. Yes, on top of scheme.
Write your own programming language (well, implement eval anyway) in a few short pages in Chapter 4. (The result is about thirty lines).
How do Von Neuman register machines work? If you don't already know, you'll be writing a simple compiler in Chapter 5.
This up-close-and-personal whirlwind tour of these important CS concepts was very enlightening to me when I read it. This book isn't about how to learn languages; rather, it's about working with ideas: why abstractions are important, how to reason with them, and how to implement them using whatever bare tools you've got.
(Schemers: before commenting, realize that i wasn't poking fun at our favorite language; rather, i'm merely asserting that scheme isn't the point of the book)
I certainly don't think I've mastered any of them - even the languages that I use every day. But I can write real-world, useful programs in all of them.
The 'superpower' that the book gave me was a set of tools to think about computation in a language-independent way. Once I had that, then every new language was "oh, here's a nice syntax for doing something I already know how to do in Scheme".
The new languages I learned were from a variety of paradigms - functional (Haskell, OCaml, R), object-oriented (Java, Python) and array-based (Q, Matlab). I haven't learned a logic-based language yet, but I've written an evaluator for one (section 4.4 of SICP) so I don't expect picking up Prolog to be difficult, if I ever choose to do it.
Thanks, my sister egged me on to cleaning out our childhood closets at our parent's house this past weekend. Lots of old stuff, unused for years, sat there gathering insignificance. Looking at the pile of junk and stuff that was still salvageable and donateable, I saw SICP in a box of textbooks. And rescued it.
I own it, and used it until I realized how much time I was wasting on unnecessary complications. Try "How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman — it cuts out the cruft and the results are just as good.
The Joy of Cooking is a great reference, but for learning, I prefer The Way to Cook by Julia Child. The recipes are classics, yet adapted a bit to be relatively simple and light. It's well-illustrated, and I really liked the organizational method of presenting very detailed, beginner-friendly master recipes and providing other recipes as variations. I gave mine away when I stopped eating so much meat and dairy (it's not exactly vegan-friendly; it's Julia Child, after all) because I couldn't stand to see it sitting around unused.
I don't think I saw The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte (available at http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Inform... ) on the list. The Boston Globe's review is 100% correct: it's a visual Strunk and White.
This book is by Charlie Munger, better known as Warren Buffet's business partner since 1959. There is more information on business than in some college classes I have taken. I have recommended it to many people.
Innovator's Dilemma gave me the "super-power" of identifying what kind of businesses will succeed or fail in the tech industry, much earlier than most people (or even big companies' CEO's). I think others who have read it and understood it will feel the same way.
I'd also recommend his sequel Innovator's Solution, which also has a few different and good insights in it. Blue Ocean Strategy is also pretty similar to the idea of "disruptive innovation", but in other non-tech industries.
These books can also be extremely helpful in identifying if you have a "good business idea" or not, and in choosing one with a high chance of success. But of course business ideas can only help you so much. In the end execution will matter a lot.
A very good complementary book to go with these, and about market dynamics and market development, is Chasm Companion. It includes all the theories from Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc, and is more like a handbook with actionable advice, too.
I'd say also read "Seeing What's Next", the third book in the disruption series. There he deals with a lot of stuff like structuring your business to take advantage of Asymmetric Motivation and Asymmetric Skills as shield and sword of your business, as well as building an orthogonal Value Network to the existing solutions to avoid co-option by incumbents (or not doing so accidentally, if you are aiming to be acquired).
> Innovator's Dilemma gave me the "super-power" of identifying what kind of businesses will succeed or fail in the tech industry, much earlier than most people (or even big companies' CEO's)
Give us some non-trivial predictions or I call BS.
I'm curious to know what you got out of Blue Ocean Strategy? It's one of the few books I ended up giving away... I felt the book's idea was entirely summed up by the title, and then dragged out for 300 pages. Once I grokked the idea of "Be a Nintendo Wii in a Playstation/XBox world", I felt I didn't get more from the book. But it's been many years since I read it.
"He Said, She Said by Deborah Tannen is a layperson's guide to gender communications."
I would actually recommend "You Just Don't Understand" by the same author about how men and women talk to each other. Valuable in ways you cannot imagine.
Within a day I was memorizing lists of 75 items forwards AND backwards. Completely random items as well.
It makes remembering names a joke, you will remember them for years.
I gave the book to my 15 year old brother and explained to him how much the book meant to me and that it was a very quick read (most of the good stuff is in the first 2 chapters anyway)
Keep in mind hes 15.. 24 hours later he comes back to me with a list of 100 items (to outdo me).. lists them forwards and backwards. That's my boy.
I distinctly remember going to a salon one time and they had tons and tons and tons of bottles of gel, shampoo, hair products lined up in a styled fashion along the middle of the wall going across the wall. by the time my haircut was done I turned around and listed off every shampoo bottle in order and the hair stylist was just like "WTF!!". She probably felt like i was a freak, but I felt really good.
Trust me, its great going to the grocery store and not needing a list, and coming up with all 35 items... makes you feel like a boss.
You are not using the loci method are you? (The memory palace)
It takes me 10 minutes to memorize a deck of cards right now. It took a lot of time to assign characters to my cards and considerable time to set up mental journeys to store the characters. It's a mental algorithm but the setup is not trivial. Maybe you are just gifted but I'll say it for the others, it's not that easy.
Not gifted, but I have a very good imagination. So does my brother, and that's what the method he uses in the book I read is based off of, so perhaps that's it.
I have a copy of Strunk and White, but I like other advice on writing much better. The new book by Steven Pinker that is promised in Jerry Coyne's post about Pinker's project
Bargaining for Advantage (Superpower: Negotiation)
The Art of Learning (Superpower: Learning)
Telling Lies (Superpower: Facial expressions etc...somewhat of a cheat since you'll probably need to read more on the topic)
Economics in One Lesson (Superpower: Understanding the fundamentals of economics...and wandering down the dark,Austrian path eventually)
Edit: An even better superpower is learning a new language and understanding the corresponding culture. I usually suggest that over anything else for anyone that knows <3 languages well
The Art of Learning is one of the best books I read this year. If you liked that, you'd also probably enjoy The Inner Game of Tennis and Mastery by Robert Greene.
I read The Art of Learning a few years ago, and remember it being basically an autobiography, and not anything like a manual that explains how one could actually attain any sort of super learning.
It's just personal stories that are basically "hey, this guy is awesome at a lot of stuff."
Hm. Well, I do remember how OCD he was about his subjects--reviewing videotapes of himself doing martial arts, studying moves, etc.
So, in that regard, I guess his approach, if you could infer one, was basically getting in his 10,000 hours in 1/4-1/3 of the time of most people.
Please correct me if my recollection is wrong though.
The Art of Learning is less about learning things than it is about becoming very, very good at the things you learn.
While the book is highly autobiographical, the author does goes into a lot of detail about how he got really good at chess and tai chi.
What a lot of people seem to forget to mention about the 10,000 hour theory is that it's 10,000 hours of purposeful, focused practice. The Art of Learning is all about doing that kind of practice.
You're right. It's definitely not a manual with a step by step plan to take like a lot of self-help type books. It's subtly brilliant.
Some of the concepts I picked up from it:
- Practice something enough to get to the point where you can perform the act/task without thinking. Your brain will then be freed up to focus on higher level things. Picture yourself moving up different levels of a pyramid.
This is also how you can slow things down in your mind. Because you've experienced something so much, your brain doesn't have to do as much processing. He talks about this in depth, The Inner Game of Tennis talks about it, and one or two other books I read this year mentioned this concept.
- Invest in loss. Most entrepreneurs have heard this 1,000 times, but it was still great to read his take on it. He couldn't get better without experiencing a little pain in practice.
- Don't fight, avoid, or deny negative forces. Instead, you should look to channel what's coming at you into something positive. He talks about the chess player who would play mental tricks on him or kick him under the table. It through him off at first, but he learned to embrace it and overcome it.
- Find a trigger zone. Develop a routine that will get you ready for peak performance. It could be for Tai Chi or a business meeting (which he gives an example of).
There is a lot more to the book, but those are a few of the main concepts he talks about.
"Inner Game of Tennis" is excellent. I have also heard good things about "Learn to Draw: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" but haven't read it (yet)
Actually "Pragmatic Thinking & Learning" is excellent and I totally forgot about it. I'd probably swap that into my list.
Economics in One Lesson (Superpower: Understanding the fundamentals of economics...and wandering down the dark,Austrian path eventually)
Austrian economics is the opposite of a superpower. It's a mental device for rationalizing the present state of the world so that you never have to act.
I'd second that. This book gives you a lot of wrong ideas (for example how banking works), a lot of moralizing and nothing at all about useful new concepts like monopolistic competition and externalities.
You will learn much more about mainstream economics from about.com for example.
It's a mental device for rationalizing the present state of the world so that you never have to act.
Well, except for the fact that an Austrian economist would change almost everything about how most Western governments handle economic policy. That's a cute sentence though.
It gives you an interesting perspective on things which is always good.
You will see a lot of the subchapter type arguments mentioned in the news and the like and at least now you have one perspective on the issues which even if you don't agree with it forces you to articulate your own side better.
It's a really good book for a layperson to start thinking about the economics section of the news. It's written well, too.
I have given away ~20 copies of this book so far and have gotten nothing but praise even from Marxists.
I don't know why I even bother to make this long post since Austrians in general are very,very far removed from being status quo-ists so your comment doesn't even make sense. The book is also not overly Austrian apart from the recommended reading.
Feel free to recommend a better "basics of economics" book.
Whether Austrians are happy with the status quo is an entirely political/class matter.
When banks get bailed-out by government, they're unhappy. When trade agreements and refusal to enforce labor laws pushes down wages and lengthens hours, that's "the free market".
A physical copy of the 3.5 "Player's Handbook", Forgotten Realms supplementary literature, and likely all the literature on Psionics. Welcome to Modern D20 with tinges of Tolkien. Maybe pepper in Neal Stephensen. Read up.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadAnother book I love, in a similar category, is "Crucial Conversations". Very useful for improving your communication skills in work and personal life.
Also, "Strengths Finder 2.0". It will tell you what superpowers you already have.
"An excellent collection of the deeper and most subtle forms of this practice of this sort can be found in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, one of the only self-help books I've read that was truly useful and not a regurgitation of cliches and applause lights. Carnegie's thesis is basically that being nice is the most powerful of the Dark Arts, and that a master of the Art of Niceness can use it to take over the world. It works better than you'd think."
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3k/how_to_not_lose_an_argument/
http://www.amazon.com/Zhuangzi-Speaks-The-Music-Nature/dp/06...
1. Ferriss, the author, is very much a hacker in his approach to trying new things and drawing conclusions. This is also very evident in his previous book, The 4-Hour Body.
2. The 4-Hour Chef not only teaches the reader how to cook (which is a superpower in itself). He also delves into the _meta_ and spends a large portion of the book, discussing the framework he uses for learning these techniques and how he has applied it to learning (and excelling in) other skill sets like judo, tango dancing and learning new languages.
Edit: This sounds like a bit of a marketing message, which it definitely is not, so I'll add a negative.
I find his books to be a bit scattered and although they're centered on an over-arching theme he doesn't always tie the threads together very convincingly. Whole chapters can seem like lightly-edited crib notes. Personally, I don't mind this style of writing and it does make his books very easy to scan and skip chapters without losing the books narrative but at times I've also found it difficult to follow.
Thing is - and this becomes more clear in his other books - men and women both have similar skills, but both have a TENDENCY to feel more comfortable in a specific skill set.
So, on the one hand I love Deida's advice. It is oftentimes on the spot. Very clear and even actionable at times. But on the other hand, it oftentimes is also too abstract, too simple, or too black-and-white. It almost feels like he's describing his favorite action movie star and if you read it that way, you can get the impression that he describes film heroes (super clear purpose, cannot be distracted, live on your edge). While a film hero can be an inspiration, it is oftentimes still a heavily simplified character.
1. I read a few titles and thought "Hmm, I'll go and buy a few of these on Amazon."
2. Then I thought: "I already have some of these books that I never read, I could gift them to others."
3. Perhaps I could set up some sort of book exchange where HN users can share books.
4. It would barely be worth the hassle and cost of postage.
5. Couldn't we share digital copies and avoid the postage?
6. That's PIRACY. The idea is dead.
It seems to me that a future where books cost a maximum of $2.99 is inevitable. I would unhesitatingly have bought 10 of these books, and there'd be almost no point in 'pirating' them, or even in sharing physical copies.
I still have the first printings of the first five books in the series.
http://thepiratesdilemma.com/about-the-book
You can. There's a service called "Lendle" that facilitates sharing (lending) Kindle books. http://lendle.me/
I'm fortunate enough to live in a city where the library does home delivery ("It's like amazon, but without the money"). Having to physically return the books can be daunting, but it's a small price to pay for eclectic reading habits with no buyer's remorse. I'd recommend that more people look into using the local library. Now that all of my books are free, I have more reading to do than I have time.
I have bought a bunch of Audible audiobooks too, but their DRM is so annoying that I rip them to mp3, and if I can bookwarez the audiobook, would just do that to avoid wasting 3h running the conversion and encoding.
"how to read a person like a book" http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Person-Like-Book/dp/B000SABRO...
and the classic dale carnegie "how to win friends and influence people" http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/14...
The Easy Way to Stop Smoking worked for me 7 years ago and I can't recommend it enough. I'll never forget scanning the table of contents and flipping to chapter 21, it sold me on the book.
I've started Drawing on the right Side of the Brain, which is basically self paced training. Really insightful so far.
Looks like a promising book list.
Barbell lifting can be the nerdiest way to work out.
Porned Out: erectile dysfunction, depression, and 7 more (selfish) reasons to quit porn
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A5X2FV4
In 2010 I started a job that was far, far ahead of my skillset. I'd written fewer than 10,000 lines of code in my life, and I was completely ill-prepared for the work I was supposed to be doing. I picked up SICP about a month or two into that job.
Fast forward a year, and I felt that I knew more about programming than half the people I worked with, and I'd moved to a smaller, more awesome company doing work that I think is much more fun.
A year since then and I've picked up half a dozen new languages, given talks at user groups on some of them. Next year I'm aiming for conferences.
Pick up this book. It gives you superpowers.
https://github.com/twcamper/sicp-kindle
It's pretty ridiculous, but I think it puts the person back into the comfortable mindset of control. Rather than learning a big, scary thing that is beyond you, you are merely manipulating the world with your powers to accomplish tasks. For whatever reason, that paradigm is more intuitive for certain people.
Definitely not an attack or a skeptic, indeed, it may play into your assessment of the worth of the book...
But 12 months, 6 languages - how well do you feel you've mastered any/all of those?
I mean, it teaches scheme for Pete's sake. Playing Devil's advocate here, who honestly uses that in pratcital everyday systems? Nobody reads the book and immediately goes "Wow! Now that I learned Scheme, which is totally the best language, I'll use my Scheme powers to create the coolest software in the world!"
The reason why this book is so cherished is because it treats scheme as a building block for implementing the most interesting ideas and patterns from systems you use every day.
Rusty on recursion? That's chapter one. You'll be thinking with recursion and will understand most of its implications by the first few dozen pages.
Think you know about OO? Build your own object-orientation system in Chapter 2. Yes, on top of scheme.
Write your own programming language (well, implement eval anyway) in a few short pages in Chapter 4. (The result is about thirty lines).
How do Von Neuman register machines work? If you don't already know, you'll be writing a simple compiler in Chapter 5.
This up-close-and-personal whirlwind tour of these important CS concepts was very enlightening to me when I read it. This book isn't about how to learn languages; rather, it's about working with ideas: why abstractions are important, how to reason with them, and how to implement them using whatever bare tools you've got.
(Schemers: before commenting, realize that i wasn't poking fun at our favorite language; rather, i'm merely asserting that scheme isn't the point of the book)
The 'superpower' that the book gave me was a set of tools to think about computation in a language-independent way. Once I had that, then every new language was "oh, here's a nice syntax for doing something I already know how to do in Scheme".
The new languages I learned were from a variety of paradigms - functional (Haskell, OCaml, R), object-oriented (Java, Python) and array-based (Q, Matlab). I haven't learned a logic-based language yet, but I've written an evaluator for one (section 4.4 of SICP) so I don't expect picking up Prolog to be difficult, if I ever choose to do it.
That's a very nice line. I like that very much.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Basics-Photos/dp/0...
This book is by Charlie Munger, better known as Warren Buffet's business partner since 1959. There is more information on business than in some college classes I have taken. I have recommended it to many people.
I'd also recommend his sequel Innovator's Solution, which also has a few different and good insights in it. Blue Ocean Strategy is also pretty similar to the idea of "disruptive innovation", but in other non-tech industries.
These books can also be extremely helpful in identifying if you have a "good business idea" or not, and in choosing one with a high chance of success. But of course business ideas can only help you so much. In the end execution will matter a lot.
A very good complementary book to go with these, and about market dynamics and market development, is Chasm Companion. It includes all the theories from Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc, and is more like a handbook with actionable advice, too.
Give us some non-trivial predictions or I call BS.
I would actually recommend "You Just Don't Understand" by the same author about how men and women talk to each other. Valuable in ways you cannot imagine.
Within a day I was memorizing lists of 75 items forwards AND backwards. Completely random items as well.
It makes remembering names a joke, you will remember them for years.
I gave the book to my 15 year old brother and explained to him how much the book meant to me and that it was a very quick read (most of the good stuff is in the first 2 chapters anyway)
Keep in mind hes 15.. 24 hours later he comes back to me with a list of 100 items (to outdo me).. lists them forwards and backwards. That's my boy.
I distinctly remember going to a salon one time and they had tons and tons and tons of bottles of gel, shampoo, hair products lined up in a styled fashion along the middle of the wall going across the wall. by the time my haircut was done I turned around and listed off every shampoo bottle in order and the hair stylist was just like "WTF!!". She probably felt like i was a freak, but I felt really good.
Trust me, its great going to the grocery store and not needing a list, and coming up with all 35 items... makes you feel like a boss.
You hardly need a book for that: I saw a waiter talking on TV about what he was doing. I heard two or three sentences or so.
And, hacker way, I devised my own memory trick to remember items.
No book needed for that ; )
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/steve-pin...
is a book that I expect to be especially helpful for Hacker News participants. The book isn't finished yet, but Pinker's lecture on how to write
http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technol...
includes a convincing critique of Strunk and White.
Students who have read Strunk and White should read two other critiques of Strunk and White,
1) the essay "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" by Geoffrey K. Pullum,
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
and
2) Adios, Strunk & White: A Handbook for the New Academic Essay by Gary and Glynis Hofman.
http://www.amazon.com/Adios-Strunk-White-Handbook-Academic/d...
Getting Things Done (Superpower: Time Management)
Bargaining for Advantage (Superpower: Negotiation)
The Art of Learning (Superpower: Learning)
Telling Lies (Superpower: Facial expressions etc...somewhat of a cheat since you'll probably need to read more on the topic)
Economics in One Lesson (Superpower: Understanding the fundamentals of economics...and wandering down the dark,Austrian path eventually)
Edit: An even better superpower is learning a new language and understanding the corresponding culture. I usually suggest that over anything else for anyone that knows <3 languages well
It's just personal stories that are basically "hey, this guy is awesome at a lot of stuff."
Hm. Well, I do remember how OCD he was about his subjects--reviewing videotapes of himself doing martial arts, studying moves, etc.
So, in that regard, I guess his approach, if you could infer one, was basically getting in his 10,000 hours in 1/4-1/3 of the time of most people.
Please correct me if my recollection is wrong though.
While the book is highly autobiographical, the author does goes into a lot of detail about how he got really good at chess and tai chi.
What a lot of people seem to forget to mention about the 10,000 hour theory is that it's 10,000 hours of purposeful, focused practice. The Art of Learning is all about doing that kind of practice.
Some of the concepts I picked up from it:
- Practice something enough to get to the point where you can perform the act/task without thinking. Your brain will then be freed up to focus on higher level things. Picture yourself moving up different levels of a pyramid.
This is also how you can slow things down in your mind. Because you've experienced something so much, your brain doesn't have to do as much processing. He talks about this in depth, The Inner Game of Tennis talks about it, and one or two other books I read this year mentioned this concept.
- Invest in loss. Most entrepreneurs have heard this 1,000 times, but it was still great to read his take on it. He couldn't get better without experiencing a little pain in practice.
- Don't fight, avoid, or deny negative forces. Instead, you should look to channel what's coming at you into something positive. He talks about the chess player who would play mental tricks on him or kick him under the table. It through him off at first, but he learned to embrace it and overcome it.
- Find a trigger zone. Develop a routine that will get you ready for peak performance. It could be for Tai Chi or a business meeting (which he gives an example of).
There is a lot more to the book, but those are a few of the main concepts he talks about.
Actually "Pragmatic Thinking & Learning" is excellent and I totally forgot about it. I'd probably swap that into my list.
Austrian economics is the opposite of a superpower. It's a mental device for rationalizing the present state of the world so that you never have to act.
You will learn much more about mainstream economics from about.com for example.
Well, except for the fact that an Austrian economist would change almost everything about how most Western governments handle economic policy. That's a cute sentence though.
You will see a lot of the subchapter type arguments mentioned in the news and the like and at least now you have one perspective on the issues which even if you don't agree with it forces you to articulate your own side better.
It's a really good book for a layperson to start thinking about the economics section of the news. It's written well, too.
I have given away ~20 copies of this book so far and have gotten nothing but praise even from Marxists.
I don't know why I even bother to make this long post since Austrians in general are very,very far removed from being status quo-ists so your comment doesn't even make sense. The book is also not overly Austrian apart from the recommended reading.
Feel free to recommend a better "basics of economics" book.
When banks get bailed-out by government, they're unhappy. When trade agreements and refusal to enforce labor laws pushes down wages and lengthens hours, that's "the free market".