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Ask Slashdot: What Books Have Had a Significant Impact On Your Life?
gspec writes "A little background about me: 36-year-old computer engineer working in the Bay Area. While I bring in a comfortable salary, I consider myself an underachiever, and my career is stagnant (I have only been promoted four times in my 12-year career). I have led a couple projects, but I am not in any sort of leadership/management position. I realize I need to do something to enhance my career, and unfortunately, going back to school is not an option. One thing I can do is to read more quality books. My question: which books, of any type or genre, have had a significant impact on your life?"
How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. Great pointers for talking to people. Also I loved the art of war.
"The Case For Mars" Robert Zubrin
When humanity stops looking towards a viable future of expansion, it always stagnates. This book puts humanity's future in perspective
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Everything I've read from Packt rates 8/10+ in my book.
I've read most all of his books, starting in high school. I doubt I would have half the imagination or curiosity about space as I do now without some of his ideas.
by Bowditch
I dropped a phone book on my foot once.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov is and will always be my favorite series of books. Those are the first real science fiction books I read, they were welcome reprieve from those terrible books I had to read in high school.
Dune by Frank Herbert. The sheer scope of events which take place in this sage showed me how insignificant daily events really were. While it was fictional, the way the Shaddam, the Baron Harkonnen, and Muad'Dib feel about their subjects/followers/slaves gave me a hard dose of reality. There are a lot of people out there, and most of them have no idea that you just got picked on walking to class, dropped some spaghetti on your shirt, or had a really crappy day.
sudo make me a sandwich
Okay. "Mere Christianity" and "The Problem of Pain"
The Penthouse Letters. It was very informative.
It's amazing what billy beanne has done on a tiny budget and going against what all the experts said
In the end it's about using data rather than hunches and old wives' tales to make business decisions
(This is not my joke/story, just paraphrasing what I remember)
Two golfers had been meeting weekly for years - lets call them Joe and Bob. Joe started to notice one day that Bob was getting a lot better. So Joe asked Bob what he was doing, and Bob replied that he was taking some golf classes on the weekends.
Joe, not wanting to be outdone, bought a golf self-improvement book. And gave it to Bob, complimenting him on his desire to improve.
A few weeks later, Bob was back to his old self, and Joe was happily able to compete again.
Moral of the story: When Joe bought Bob the book, Bob stopped practicing and started reading. Don't substitute reading for doing.
Baver
Atlas Shrugged fantastic book Atlas Shrugged part 2 is in theaters today as luck would have it
Paul Ryan is on Slashdot?
The C Programming Language - Kernighan and Ritchie
The Design of the Unix Operating System - Bach
Computer Networks - Tannenbaum
The Art Of Computer Programming - Knuth
Security Engineering - Anderson
Godel Escher and Bach - Hofstader
The Demon Haunted World - Sagan
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy - Adams
Adolph Hitler, My Part In His Downfall - Milligan
The Bible. Except for atheists and agnostics, most people should insert their favorite holy book here.
My college calculus book. Naturally.
Half a bookshelf full of Dr. Seuss books from my school library that I read as a kid.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Most of Heinlein's work, although my personal favorite is Job:A Comedy of Justice (I'd swear the South Park guys got their idea of Heaven and Hell from their).
I'd add in Atlas Shrugged also, I didnt read until I was 35+.
HG Wells, Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, and Robert E Howard. Lovecraft and Howard had the biggest influence. I read a lot of scifi like A Mote In God's Eye and Robert Heinlein but Howard and Lovecraft had the biggest influence.
Why Societies Need Dissent - Cass Sunstein
The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose
Liars and Outliers - Bruce Schneier
Diplomacy - Henry Kissenger
Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams
Free to Choose - Milton Friedman
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Bible
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
You must be new here. Your answer is not only "not helpful", but it plays to the Slashdot crowd. Your intent was to look intelligent and enlightened, but in reality you look intolerant and ignorant.
That being said, I'll take the bait. As a rebuttal to "not showing anything of actual import or meaning."(sic), a Christian would argue that its importance is that they are no longer damned by their sins. The historian would argue that its importance is that it provides historical context for various periods of time. The anthropologist would argue that its importance is that it provides insight into the culture and traditions of early Jewish people. And so on...
But being that you're an average twelve year old neoatheist, your intolerance causes you to spew out this garbage when it wasn't asked for. Specifically, nobody answered "The Bible", but you provided a preemptive "rebuttal" anyway.
Not the books themselves, per se.
I remember reading it when I was a kid
I got first
Who wrote this? I checked Amazon and Google Books and found nothing, so I'm guessing it's obscure. Then again, I only checked the top-10 results for each. Do you have an ISBN?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It can help you to look at life in a different way...
+1
Though I like KSR's "The Years of Rice and Salt" the best.
by Richard Dawkins, a sure Eye Opener!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
My impression is that only people who have read very few books are likely to say that any one book has had a "significant impact on their lives." No one book has all the answers, but people who read enough of them do tend to become wiser. Anyway, if you're looking for a good book, first find a good author.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567
This book taught me more about coding (and recursion, and all sorts of other concepts) than any language-specific book I've read. I carried it around for a couple of years, making my way through as I could. Highly recommended.
While there are other great books (Dune was mentioned earlier), I have found Time Enough for Love has had more long term affects on my thinking than any other. In large part because it is so darn quotable:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein#Time_Enough_for_Love_.281973.29
Also it is about the wisdom of a man who has lived for thousands of years, so I think the idea that it is a man's attempt to condense as much wisdom in one book as possible. Let me just reference my favorite quote:
Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please — this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time — and squawk for more!
So learn to say No — and to be rude about it when necessary.
Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.
(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)
- TEfL
Well, except for the ones by Ayn Rand - those made me more stupid. So I had to read some Chomsky and Borges to fix that.
That is all.
I always preferred The Screwtape Letters to Lewis' other works. It's a fun read, and an interesting look at the psychological nature of temptation even if you don't go in for the religious aspects of it.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Dune
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
1984
Neuromancer
Atlas Shrugged
Three Pillars of Zen
The Bible
The Art of Happiness, The Art of Happiness at Work
Foundation
Most of Robert Heinlein's books and short stories. (man who sold the moon is still a favorite)
An introduction to microcomputers, Volume 1
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
One of my English teachers strongly recommended reading the Bible, not for the religious content, but because there are an enormous number of literary references to it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
the words used indicates he considered promotion to be enhancing career. Therefore he just needs to become the right kind of jerk.
The Prince -- Machiavelli
The Art of War -- Sun Tzu
Steve Jobs -- Dylan Baker
You know what, forget the last one, world doesn't need any more of those extreme over-the-top jerks
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And all the subsequent Robert Caro LBJ books, especially the third book on the Senate. Very well researched and written. Five book series (BIG books, too) that he started writing in the 1970's. The last one isn't even out yet.
Not specifically for the LBJ content, though it is interesting, but for showing how the US government (especially congress) REALLY works from the inside. And showing what types of people become politicians and how megalomaniacal they tend to be.
But one I'd suggest, which I pretty much never see anyone else mention, is The Day the Universe Changed (companion to the BBC miniseries, now available on YouTube.) It's sort of about the history of science, but more so it's about how our discoveries about the world changed (and continue to change) our perception of it.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
On a more serious note, i did really like James P Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear." Before reading it i'd always had the impression that Communism sounded like a nice idea but had serious issues on a large scale. I felt the book put forward a completely believable scenario for a stable Anarcho-Libertarian-Communist society. All you need to achieve it is get some advanced tech, and then burn the current social system down to the ground and destroying the very roots of the culture itself.
I'm not sure if it was more heartening for convincing me that something resembling utopia is actually possible, or disheartening for convincing me it's something we'll never achieve on this planet unless we go through an incredible amount of pain and suffering first.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.
A touching story about focusing one what matters in life from the point of view of a nerdy geek with months to live.
Personally I'd be tempted to consider subscriptions to some business magazines. Personally I quite like Fortune and Harvard Business Review. They won't give you the depth of books focused on specific subjects but they give you a broader understanding of what is happening and can help direct you towards subjects you think are important and wish to investigate further.
I would however also suggest reading Robert Cialdini: Influence and Bruce Patton: Difficult Conversations. Neither are about business strategy or leadership instead they both focus on how to consider other peoples positions, how to interact effectively and build productive relationships.
Most of us are no good at judging literature and consider Dan Brown to be a totally kickass author?
Lots of us go to church so we're used to really boring, repetitive, preachy monologues full of unjustifiable logical leaps and question-begging?
Political science and theory education is all but non-existant outside of university major programs specializing in those areas? Ditto general philosophy and reasoning.
If enhancing your career is your goal, I'm not entirely sure reading books is going to do it for ya. It's not like you can leave a copy of "The Question Behind the Question" on your desk and your boss is suddenly going to think, 'Hey, I need to promote that guy.' Ain't gonna happen. So here's some specific career enhancing techniques:
1. Quit your job and get a different one. Oh, I know that's easier said than done, and you probably have some nice benefits you've accumulated by now. The sad fact is, that is the quickest way to a management level and on to a C-level if that's your goal. If you look around and you rarely see people promoted within your company, guess what - you're not going to get promoted. That means it's time to pad your resume (yes, stretch the truth to the breaking point so it's obvious you've managed people) and apply for management jobs elsewhere. If you get offered a job, negotiate a higher salary and better benefits.
2. Learn accounting and marketing. Try to get on the job experience in both of those areas working with those individuals. Accounting is important to understand if you want to become a manager because budgeting comes into play and you can do some creative GL accounting within your department to get what you need accomplished. Marketing is important to get experience in because that's where all the Cool Kids work. Knowing the Cool Kids and hanging out with them will get you bonus points with management.
3. Kiss people's asses. Or, at least grace your boss's desk with a decent bottle wine or a six pack if he did something you appreciate. In an earlier time this was a concept called "courtesy".
4. Take some classes outside of work. On a basic level, look for one of those seminars held on weekends at hotels in your area, specifically a class in negotiation. We all negotiate every day of our lives and it is immensely helpful to understand when and how to do it properly. If anything, it'll help your marriage. Maybe it's worth taking a management class as well. Here's some Fred Pryor seminars in your area: http://www.fredpryor.com/site/default.aspx
5. See the above about learning accounting and marketing. Maybe you could take a class at a local community college.
6. Ask your boss for a promotion. Surprisingly enough, it could be that simple. Don't wait for an opening to appear, just go directly to your manager or his manager (if you know him well) and ask. Maybe your company never knew you were interested in a promotion. Maybe they just thought you're happy doing what you're doing. If there isn't a job open, it's completely possible they've been thinking of creating a new job and just didn't have the right person available to do it, nor did they think they could hire the person externally. Maybe that guy is you.
7. Finally, if you just want to read some books, I liked Jack Welch's autobiography. I also liked "Good to Great". I'm reading Keith Richard's biography right now, "Life"; pretty much a textbook for what not to do to your body.
----- obSig
I'm not sure if it really addresses the asker's needs but Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein had a profound effect on me when I read it the first time as a young teenager.
In my opinion, you can't have a decent quality of life without large doses of humour on a regular basis.
I have never found a better writer than Sir Terry Pratchett for dry, engaging wit, and the occasional turn of phrase that will still leave you chuckling days later. His Discworld series also provides concise and often cutting criticisms of society and some of our more inane foibles, camouflaged behind the general fantasy setting (the Campaign for Equal Heights movement for Dwarves, for example). His characters are engaging and his situational comedy is absolutely stellar!
Please don't be thrown just because it is situated in a world that is shaped like a disc, perched atop four elephants who in turn are standing on a giant turtle swimming through the deeps of space :) Yes, it's set in a 'silly' world, and populated with fantastic creatures, but the challenges and triumphs his characters face are usually very applicable to this here modern, mundane world. I heartily recommend all of his works, but the Discworld books in particular.
Happy hunting!
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
No, it *is* the Bible. It's the most influential book ever, and it affects you as well, whether you agree with its teachings or not. It's the very basis for Western civilization & morality (though that morality is under attack.) Now I'm going to surprise you and say I'm an atheist. I indeed am, but the Bible's influence on my life cannot be understated.
How to win friends and influence people. Flat out 900X better and more important than ANY other book out there, and should be required reading for most people yearly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's quite simple: It tells a certain kind of person exactly what he wishes to hear. The fact that it's a message that overlaps with the cultural mythology of the United States (the "rugged individualism" trope) makes it appealing to those who've been raised to buy into that. It's (lack of) literary value (much like a vice/presidential candidate's debate performance) is irrelevant to a true believer.
More likely your second because most men have their first one in their 20s, when adulthood turns out to be not at all like what you expected.
Rather than fish for books, I'd recommend having a look around at your friends, workmates, and acquaintances about your age or a little older and identify three things:
1. Who is having the most fun?
2. Who has reasonable job security, to the extent that exists today?
3. What skills do they have that you don't?
Use these things to guide your choices for skills to develop- maybe they are technical, or maybe they are people skills, but you'll be working towards filling a deficit that can open new/better opportunities for you.
Personally, I think there is limited benefit to enhancing coding skills, such as learning a new language or framework- they are a dime a dozen and the industry always has a new fad. On the other hand I think there's a lot of value in learning new analytical skills. Everyone and their dog wants to mine actionable intelligence from their customer data and the ability to scrub, synthesize and model is a key asset. Plus when the data is sufficiently rich it can be a lot of fun compared to setting up yet another web site. If you want to take it all the way to home plate, pick up some machine learning skills, eg by taking one of the Stanford or Udacity online courses and dazzle your employers with your ability to predict that your customer is pregnant... ;-)
btw, IMO a promo every three years seems about par for the course- not fantastic but nothing to complain about. The real difficulty is that promotion velocity tends to slow over time, since there can only be so many head chefs.
$0.02
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Have you actually read it? I find that most people that "rejoice it" have not. It's full of rape scenes.. In fact all of her books are focused on rape fantasy... Very very odd.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Diesel Traction - A Manual for Enginemen
My late father found a copy of this in an old railway workshop he was converting into a heavy goods vehicle workshop and brought it home, when I was about six or seven years old. I picked it up and read it, fascinated by the cutaway diagrams of the engines and gearboxes that went into the different styles of locomotive, and the circuit diagrams of all the control gear. There were detailed explanations of how the automatic gearboxes in diesel-mechanical locomotives worked, and how the injector pump, fuel rack and injectors worked in a diesel engine.
At that point, I realised that while I would probably never work on a 1962 diesel railcar, I held in my hand the key to knowing *everything*. All I needed to understand absolutely anything I ever encountered was the right diagram, and the mental toolkit to look at what was in front of me and understand how different parts work together as part of a whole system. From that moment onwards everything else was easy.
You've just got to look at things and see the exploded diagram in your mind's eye.
I thought that was a fantastic book as well.
by Peter van der Linden
A profound influence that made me aware of the depth of programming expertise.
Unfortunately PvdL's recent books doesn't live up to this awesome tome.
TCAP-Abort
1. The Blind Watchmaker - Dawkin's - permanently fixed in my mind how life on earth works.
2. How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker - still among the best, easiest to read and most comprehensive view of cognitive science.
3. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman - though a life of clever experiments he discovered many bugs in human cognitive process - so you know what mistakes to look out for in your own mind.
4. I am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter - deal with the sadness of nothingness after death.
5. Daring Greatly - Brene Brown - how and why to live authentically and not let fear/embarrassment/shame/guilt/etc. get in your way.
6. Getting Things Done - how to get organized so you can make progress toward your goals.
7. Profit!
Do you realize that the bible is the literary basis for pretty much all of the western hemisphere? Ignorance is NOT bliss, and it's an invaluable source of understanding the perticular predicements we are currently finding ourselves in too.
You may not hold a conscious position, but I don't believe it's possible to be neither. Either you hold the preposition "I believe in at least one god" to be true, or you don't. The relevance doesn't come into question.
I don't think about the question unless someone else brings it up - much like you have now - but that doesn't mean I can't reason about my own beliefs (not faith).
(Yes, you may also take the Ignostic position that claims the preposition to be senseless since 'god' is undefined. Nevertheless, there are some more concrete definitions of 'god'. Yahweh, for example).
Dilbert RSS feed
True - on one hand, you have a group of people vociferously claiming conclusive knowledge of a mystical sort that is beyond their abilities to explain - they just know it because it feels right and they haven't seen any contradictions of their beliefs; If you disagree with them, you're written off as nothing more than an ignorant savage.
And on the other hand, you have the Christians, who will do all of that, too, but they'll pray for you while they do it.
[citation needed]
As an atheist I would be very interested in what kind of mystical knowledge I presumably claim I have.
(And yes, I do understand that this was a joke)
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Admit it, you made those words up didn't you?
I feel that I should be able to offer insightful advice to this question. After all, I spent the first 14 years after college working in Silicon Valley, though I have now worked 12 years for a company I founded in NC. I always had difficulty reading, but lately I've read about a book a week, by converting them to text, converting them to sound with the Mary TTS text-to-speech system, and blasting them into my ears at 3X speedup. While not literary for most of my life, I am now in a position where I've read far more than most people. It's weird, but now I'm "literary".
I would have to say that the fact that previously I could not read well had the most profound influence on my life. I also could not remember stuff. So, for example, this morning my daughter asked me how fast she'd be going if she launched down the zip-line I helped put together last weekend. This insane device drops about 23 feet over a 100 foot run, but has an industrial strength break to stop you before slamming into the tree at the bottom of the hill. I can't remember sh-t, especially formulas like how fast things go. So, I integrated in my head to get v = Gt, then D = 1/2 Gt^2, which is about 16 t^2, in feet/second. So, t^2 = 23/16 ~= 24/16 = 1.5. Since speed = integral(acceleration), and then I made a mistake and guessed you'd be going about 1.5*32 feet per second, or 48 fps, instead of 39fps. I told her after a few seconds that she'd be going 33 mph, or enough to be really really sorry if you hit that tree. Close enough to the 29 mph more accurate number. This is what I do normally in a few seconds, mistakes and all.
My point is I didn't get any of that analytical skill through reading. Just the opposite. Now that I'm reading like a fiend doesn't seem to really help my value as a geek. I'd recommend ditching books for a couple years, and seeing what you can do with your brain on the problems in front of you.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
It doesn't matter if it's a valid basis for morality. The question was if it had an impact and it's had a major one on you as seen in the very phrasing of what you said. The FSM is a riposte to it. "fuck god" is said as an example of a disagreement with it. It's embedded in many of the very idioms of the language you happen to use (obviously it would be different if you spoke Chinese rather than English).
No matter whether it is a valid basis or not, it's been used to define much of culture in many countries and the ideas in it shaped history. Sometimes it did so in pretty bad ways, such as the Crusades. Sometimes it led to better things.
You could say the same about the Koran for those in Islamic countries. Regardless of whether someone had read it or agreed with it, it had tremendous impact on the society around them.
i love John Irving, i wouldn't suggest anyone start with his first few books though. the three essential John Irving books are A Prayer For Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules and The World According To Garp. read those in any order, then read some more in any order, if you are so inclined
nobody's perfect
That's my favorite besides Jonah, which has the additional virtue of being very short.
Not that either is going to be of interest to someone looking to enhance their career.
Ecclesiastes showed me why enhancing my career didn't matter and to look to other things for fulfillment.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/07/reading-fiction-empathy-study
Reading books also can expose you to many ideas, models, and world views that you might not otherwise encounter. Learning a new world view can radically change your personality and belief systems. Case in point; Young Christians learning about Atheism.
cej102937
Most of the people who criticize Atlas Shrugged haven't read it, even if they say they have. It's a great book. I second the recommendation!
I read Atlas Shrugged and to my knowledge all of Ayn Rand's other published works. In fact I thought she was the shiznit when I was 16. It all seemed so simple: these people over here are good, and those other people over there are evil. However, I have come to understand real life is a good deal more complex than that, and the binary distinctions favoured by ideologues like Rand in no way correspond with reality.
I have come to believe that any philosophy based on hate is fundamentally untenable.
Feh. The Bible is merely one collection of texts out of Greco-Roman classical antiquity, and not the most influential among them. It is certainly not the work on which Plato, Aristotle, or Homer based their works. And are you discounting the entirety of the pre-Christian Roman Empire's contribution? Because a lot of people would consider that the basis of Western civilization and morality.