| Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software | Useful in visualizing the different types of abstract responsibilities that classes can have. |
| Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! | Very good intro book, but it took a while to figure out with the different paradigms that they were building up concepts and then revealing the standards, so it was hard to tell if they were showing me how one might implement a Functor, or literally Functor's definition in the standard library. |
| The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition | Good book on the mindset needed to become a programmer that doesn't build in technical debt over time. |
| Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #234 | Not sure if I should be counting podcasts on this one, but with it being almost four hours long, it at least felt like an audio book. Really interesting to hear the man behind Wolfram Alpha speak. The concepts were interesting, but I might be a little too pragmatic and dumb to appreciate all the implications of the work. |
| Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success | I think there were a lot of novel concepts in this book that ended up being a good way of framing things. Sales has to be a hard job because there's already so many people out doing it, and the tired techniques can become tropes. I think this book was in a decent spot of useful information that didn't sound too obvious, too vague, or too scammy/gimmicky. |
| Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life... And Maybe the World | This one might be a little bit cheating, since it is so short (roughly 2 hours as audio book). I had heard the commencement speech by McRaven within the past few years. The audio book basically ends with it. The earlier portion has more stories. McRaven as the narrator is a really nice touch. The guidance given in the book isn't earth shattering, but delivered very well. I think it's good to hear things like this from people who have lived really unique lives. It does more to put it into perspective. |
| Foundation | I've been reading this for a while, and actually watched the series on AppleTV. I haven't read a fiction book in years and this one was a nice re-entrance into the genre. The lack of characters that last the full book is jarring at first, but then easily adjusted to. The drama of the book lacks the now common sci-fi action. The drama is interpersonal and sociological. The ploys laid out are done by strategists and leaders. The premise is sci-fi, but it feels much more a political thriller. Very much recommend. |
| Atomic Habits | I started this audiobook while on travel and used it for the commute. Maybe it's due to my listening habits, but this book has been sitting on the top of the recommended for a long time now. After listening to it, I completely understand why. The themes in the book play together well with the other concepts in the other self-development books. Usually when that happens, it can feel a bit like a re-hash of well-established advice, but Clear brings a good spin to it and adds enough to it that it feels good. I think the main takeaway is to fall in love with "The Process." You shouldn't be motivated to bench X lbs, or learn X programming language, or achieve X goal in general. You should become the gym-goer that continually improves, the autodidact that's always learning, or whatever type of person would be the type of person to achieve X goal. Working with that as a premise, we can reverse engineer what the type of person we want to be has to do in day-to-day life, and we can follow those habits to improve our lives. |
| The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived | This was the second book from William H McRaven that I've listened to. At under three hours, it was a pretty quick listen. A lot of short stories both from his life and the lives of others that he uses to demonstrate various aspects of the code. It's worth noting, that he never goes "This is what I've done and this is why I represent X aspect of the Hero Code. A very pleasant listen and McRaven's voice has a refreshing candor that is hard to come by in the public sphere. A certainly welcome perspective in today's times. |
| Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World | This was my third book by Cal Newport, with the first two being So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work. Those two are really good and I highly recommend them. I think this particular one falls flat for me. It may because it feels like it starts to overlap with the other two, or that I'm off social media already. In a sense, I'm already a convert, so all of the convincing that a lot of the book focuses on is just not necessary. Because of all that, I feel it's hard to decide on whether or not I would recommend this book. I think it's a good, but not as good as the other two. |
| How Will You Measure Your Life | I believe this book was a recommendation of a friend of mine. It's been sitting on the wish/read list for a while and its turn has finally come. I was really expecting this book to focus pretty completely on the personal side of life and potentially the spirirtual. It ended up having exploring concepts through both professional and personal sides. The book has three authors and they explore the topics together. With the narrator not changing, it was a little tricky determining which one was giving the advice, so that caused a little confusion in remembering what trajectories each one's lives took. That's a little important as the authors pull from their own personal experiences as demonstrations of the concepts. I think the overall big takeaways were that you need to prioritize the personal life if you don't want it to fall a part in the future and that strategies that you think are good in the long and short term might actually only be good in the short and could lead to ruin in the long term. This could be sacraficing today's relationships with friends and family for career advancement or losing business capabilities for short-term lower priced supplies. The book was a quick listen and had some good stories in it from big companies. The personal stories are heartwarming as well. |
| Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics) | This is a very short book. I'm really stretching the definition here in order to count it on the list. I think the topics that this book covers and the concepts it introduces make it worth the ~$10 price. Roughly, being aware of what your learning and performance styles are, and making sure to work in the size and type of business you can thrive in. Making sure to match values that might not be "good" vs "bad." Also, making sure to develop a long-term secondary path for when you get to mid-life. Not sure how memorable it will be, but it was thought provoking and a quick read. |
| Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson |
This book really grew on me throughout listening to it. I suppose I need to read titles more carefully, as I hadn't realized this was a collection of writings and speeches. Had I known that the first section of the book was literally just the shareholder letters from Amazon from its first year, 1997, to 2019, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. After slogging through the first few years, though, it become much more enjoyable. Hearing about technologies like next-day shipping, e-readers, Alexa, AWS, and more and how a company that started out selling books was moving into those spaces was really eye-opening. It's interesting recognizing that it wasn't obvious that they would be these super big successes when they first came out. After the shareholder letters, there are readings of various speeches and interviews that Bezos has done. Those culminate near the end with talking about space colonies for humanity to expand into, which was pretty unexpected to find in a book like this, but plays well when you remember about Blue Origin, Bezos' space company. Besides the length of time it took to get used to the corporate speak that all the letters have, the other main annoyance was the repetition in the collected materials. There's definitely a few anecdotes that get brought up multiple times that you just have to bear through. There were a number of concepts that I found really useful presented in the book. One being the differentiation between "one-way doors" and "two-way doors", or non-reversible and reversible decisions, respectively. The recognition that not only is there that distinction, but to handle those decisions differently was a good insight. The other main take away was the idea of "disagree, but commit". Long meetings where decisions have to be made can feel like wars of attrition between disagreeing sides, with one side eventually exhausting out and relented to the other. This happens because the option of "hey, I'll support this path, but I don't think we should have taken it initially" or the "disagree, but commit" wasn't on the table. Having been in a few of these types of discussions, I'm looking forward to trying to introduce this concept in my next long meeting. The other concept that I found really unique was Bezos' commitment to inventing. I've already referenced the various products and services that in hindsight look like obvious winners. The book doesn't fail to mention the failures as well. The first couple iterations of Amazon Marketplace failed out, as well as the attempt at the Fire Phone. Bezos' commitment to creating new things while fully realizing that the majority of them would amount to nothing, betting on the successes being so successful that it would make up for it was really refreshing. Very cool to see that the notion scales proportionally to the size of the company as well. Big companies should have big experiments that will inevitably result in big failures, because they will have big successes as well, and those successes will be bigger than if they had stayed at a smaller company's level of experimenting. The final concept that I enjoyed was to focus on continually operating the business as a way of bringing value to the customer, as opposed to fighting the competition in the market. The strategy shouldn't be "We need to create a widget better than the widget from Company X", it should be "How can we make a widget that customers will really love using?" Even better, "What is something that doesn't currently exist that we can create that would really improve the lives of our customers?" While a very slow start to this book, and at times it felt more like homework than entertainment, the concepts introduced and the opening of the "Maybe I should read more shareholder letters?" door made this book well worth it. |
| The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse | To be honest, I don't recall how long this book's been on my shelf. I bought it on a whim one night scrolling through Amazon, almost entirely based on the positive reviews and the snippets of brush strokey art work. A couple casual flips through the book told me that it would be a book that I'd need to be in the proper head space for. Some months later, I was in the right space and felt like pushing through the small book. With a simple premise binding the pages together into a loose story, each page reads like a little piece of advice from an older family member. Little bits of wisdom that the world forgets to tell us in our daily struggles. But it's good to take hear them again, if not for the first time. I got the sense that the book was meant more for younger children, which is good. It made me happy that they would have soft, comforting book to form enduring memories and lessons of. Would recommend for parents. |
| Real World Haskell | TODO |
| Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Sucess, One Relationship at a Time | TODO |
| The Rust Programming Language (Covers Rust 2018) | TODO |
| Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us | TODO |