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Books that Changed Your Life?
Pubb asks: "I'm a Computer Science teacher at a school with an interesting tradition. Every year, the graduating student who has performed best in a particular subject area is given a book prize. Rather than give this particular student the usual book on Java or Linux, I would like to get something more impactful. I ask you, fellow Slashdot readers, to name the books that helped unleash your geek within. All I ask is that the book be reasonably available, even if it is no longer in print."
an Eternal Golden Braid.
A must book for anyone serious about CS.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
You know, it might be english class Fodder, but Fahrenheit 451 is a book that every kid should seriously *read*, on their own, and not in a class.
Seriously, it's one of the best lessons you could give a kid in today's world. A nice hardcover would be the perfect addition to a book collection or a great novel to start a love of reading.
My one other recommendation, though esoteric and perhaps more suited to my interests, would be "Descartes Error", by Damasio. It's a book about the tie between logic and emotion in the human brain, and reads like a novel (a non-neurologist could easily read it). I highly recommend it.
What Should I Do with My Life?
...that is all. :-)
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It also gives Wilde's brilliant opinions on what the meaning of Art is. Basically, in a time when so many people are asking "Why are we here", Wilde gives an answer. Obviously you may not agree with him later, but damned if you don't believe while reading it.
It's hard to explain Wilde's writing in a short comment. His writing is full, beautiful, and has endless amounts of wit. It is the perfect "life changer" for a geek.
Just a couple of quotes from Dorian Gray(taken from Wikipedia):
This is a hard topic for me, as I'm an avid reader, I could come up with 20 books off the topic of my head to suggest.
GEB is not a book for anybody with a technical college education. I don't think I could manage to read it again myself after a PhD in CS. I did read it when I was 16, though, and I thought it was the most amazing thing I ever read, and it convinced me I wanted to study math and CS in college.
So I agree with your last sentence, I guess. There is a place for "inspirational" technical books like GEB and to say "just read Knuth instead" is missing the point by a mile.
Right now, I'm reading Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. It's the history of the world as told by salt. Salt, it seems, was the petroleum of the ancient world. Venice, for example, was founded on considerable wealth generated mostly from salt. British salt was ballast in slave ships, making one third of the voyage to the New World and creating a entire economy in the Caribbean. The Romans were paid in salt, which they called 'sal'. It's from this that we get the modern word 'salary'. And a Roman salad was lettuce/veg with oil and salt.
In that same vein, you've got another hell of a book in Robert Wolke's What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained. It's basically excerpts from Wolke's "Food 101" column in the Washington Post, but they make for fascinating reading.
I've also got Alton's books. I'm Just Here for the Food is a great intro to the why's and how's of cooking.
If your student winners aren't into food, you might try the latest volume in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, The Confusion. Although in case they haven't read Quicksilver, you might want to get that as well, and maybe give them both as a set. At a little over 1,700 pages, if they don't find a job right away, they'll have something to occupy their time this summer.
You could also give them a gift certficate from your local book seller. Maybe put it in a nice card that everyone can sign?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
For a Programmer:
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Baghavad Gita
The C Programming Language
Thinking Forth
on one end of the spectrom, i have HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy.
:)
on the other i have 1984.
take your pick
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
by Plato. A discussion of the nature of knowledge and the ways in which we know what we know. This book has proven to be absolutely indispensable for my work as a programmer. Rigorous mental discipline with an eye toward tearing down what we think we know to understand how to know is not only good practice for designing applications but also for life in general. I give it to all my student-aged friends.
by L. Ron Hubbard. It's much easier to avoid the potholes of life if you know what a pothole looks like. Dianetics is truly what I'd recommend if you want to curl up on a winter evening by a nice warm fire. My copy burned for about 20 minutes!
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I was just at the end of second grade, and *really* into submarines. My neighbor was two years older than me, and made fun of me for getting "little kids' two-page books" when we went to the bookmobile. So early that Summer, I got another age-appropriate book about submarines, but I also got 20,000 Leagues. It took me most of the Summer and several renewals, but I was determined to read that book. To be honest, quite a bit of it zoomed over my head, too. But I read the whole thing.
A good lesson in stick-to-it-ivness, and it helped launch my life-long interest in Science Fiction, which helped launch my interest and career in technology, as an engineer.
As a bad side-effect, I never looked at any of the many 20,000 Leagues movies quite the same, after that book, since none I've seen were truly faithful. (Most tried to hint at nuclear power, instead of really good batteries, etc.)
I really ought to reread the book, some time. For all the books I've read and re-read, I've never re-read that one.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
microserfs by doug coupland is by far one of my favorite books of all time. i read it my sophomore year of high school and even now it still resonates strongly with me. actually, i really like almost all his books (particularly all families are psychotic, hey nostradamus!, and generation x).
i have a hard time expressing just how profound an effect doug coupland's work has had on me microserfs was the book that cemented my decision to major in c.s. for the first time in my life there was a book with characters who i could actually relate to. looking back now, a lot of the technological details seem a bit quaint, but it is still a really excellent read.
A good geek should know about the ones that came before, and learn from their mistakes and triumphs. Some books on geek history:
In The Beginning Was The Command Line by Neal Stephenson is a good overview of the culture of Linux, Macintosh, Be, and Microsoft in essay form. I've given it to non-computer geeks to teach them about Linux, and why it's different from windows. He talks about how modern society tries to impose a false image over everything to make things easier to deal with(like Disney) and compares that to the GUI vs. CLI differences. I don't agree with everything he says, but Stephenson is definitely a great writer, and he has the book available free at the link I put in.
Hackers by Steven Levy covers important epochs of the hacker culture, from its beginning at MIT to game developers in the 80s. It even has a chapter on Stallman starting GNU! A must-read for any geek.
If you at all interested in copyright, patents, open source, public domain, Internet, and the airwaves, this book is a well-written overview of these issues, along with suggested solutions to some of the problems involved. In paperback.
I know on the surface it looks like a simple read, but the book nails every aspect of conflict so precisely, but still stated in simple enough terms that can be easily applied to nearly any situation. I don't mean to make it sound like a self help book or anything of the sort, but when are we ever not fighting for what we want?
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. A journey in coming to grips with the real world and finding your place in it.
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character
and What Do You Care What Other People Think? both by Richard P. Feynman et al.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
All three of these books I happened to have read between my sophomore and junior year of high school.
These books changed my life because they provided accounts of people (geeks) pursuing their love of science/technology in a fiercely dedicated and independent way, all at a young age (you get early accounts of folks like Stallman, Gates, Jobs, Woz, etc. as 20-somethings in "Hackers") , and ended up making huge contributions to research/industry. You also get to hear about the enormous sacrifices, regrets, and risks taken (some succeeding, some failing), and ultimately an important perspective on the lives of some very smart and important characters in a way that I think is still relevant to graduating high school kids today.
Best,
Andrew
well, it might be a little far afield, but guns, germs and steel is one of the few books i've read that dramatically changed my point-of-view about a lot of things all at once. it basically sets out to figure out why the disparities between different cultures and races exist.
along the way, he draws from several diverse disciplines (botany, genetics, anthropology, archeology, etc), which is probably the most relevant facet of the book to the question -- it does a great job of showing how to use different approaches to solve problems.
-esme