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."

Comments

Godel, Escher, Bach

[epsalon]

an Eternal Golden Braid.

A must book for anyone serious about CS.

Re:Godel, Escher, Bach

[Mr. Slippery]

For "books that changed my life", I'd recommend instead The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Dennett. It was used as the text for the philosophy class I took my freshman year in college; I can still remember the day when, bored at my part-time campus job, I flipped through it to find Smullyan's Is God a Taoist? , which forever cleared up for me the whole question of free will versus determinism:

Mortal: Anyway, it is reassuring to know that my natural intuition about having free will is correct. Sometimes I have been worried that determinists are correct.

God: They are correct.

Mortal: Wait a minute now, do I have free will or don't I?

God: I already told you you do. But that does not mean that determinism is incorrect.

Mortal: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren't they?

God: The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.

Mortal: What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!

God: You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.

Mortal: So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

God: It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish.

It might be english class fodder...

[Ieshan]

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.

Geeks love cooking, right?

[Wee]

Lately I've been into cooking. Blame it on Alton and Good Eats. I could have used some food knowledge after I got out of college.

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

Zen, Gita, C, Forth

[jhoger]

For a Programmer:

Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Baghavad Gita
The C Programming Language
Thinking Forth

Dianetics

[MarsDefenseMinister]

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!

Microserfs

[blackcoot]

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.

Know your geek history

[identity0]

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.

Hackers and Feynmann, and here's why...

[CaptainAbstraction]

"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

Guns, Germs and Steel

[esme]

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