Books We've Read
From The Tronically Hip
Contents |
[edit] Fiction
[edit] Fantasy/Sci-Fi
[edit] Snow Crash, by Neal Stevenson
My boss recommended this to me, and I quite enjoyed it. It explores the idea of an information virus that can infect the human brain, and suggests that massive social changes such as the Tower of Babel event are examples of infectuous thought. Plus it's got all the cyberpunk flair of the Matrix from long before the Matrix ever existed. (- Mike)
[edit] Watership Down, by Richard Adams
A wonderful adventure story about a band of rabbits escaping from their home warren to make a new life. (- Mike)
[edit] The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis
This is just a thin little book, but a wonderful one. Lewis dispenses with the over-wrought flame imagery and portrays Hell as a gigantic town where there is an infinity of material possessions, which satisfy no one. He shows the resentful attitudes of some of the people there, and in a particularly grim scene, displays a Christian pastor who believes himself to be in Heaven.
[edit] Digital Fortress, by Dan Brown
From the author of The Davinci Code, Digital Fortress is the story of one 'unbreakable' code designed to destroy the NSA's hold on intelligence, cool spy/geek book. (- Ryan H)
[edit] Non-Fiction
[edit] Robotics
[edit] Neural Smithing, by Reed and Marks
For those interested in more abstract AI concepts, this book is an overview of feedforward artificial neural networks. Covers structure, applications and guided training methods. Still waiting on the Stats course to learn some of the math, but that particular part of the math isn't critical to understanding the concepts. (- Ryan)
[edit] Programming
[edit] Hackers & Painters, by Paul Graham
Paul Graham is one of the folks who did extremely well during the Bubble, and then sold his company to Yahoo before it burst. This is a book with a lot of interesting ideas in it, even if you don't understand everything he talks about. (- Mike)
[edit] Best Software Writing, collected by Joel Spolsky
This book actually includes a Graham essay, but also a number of others that were nominated on Spolsky's blog. All the essays are online and linked to from here, but there's nothing like having the deadtree.
[edit] Design
[edit] The Zen of CSS Design, by Dave Shea
This is more of a general book about design than CSS. It covers typography, colors, layout, iconography, and other topics. A really interesting browser. [1]
