Hackers and Painters

Best business books: -Secrets of Sandhill Road -Hackers and Painters -The Great CEO within -Venture Deals -Predictable Revenue -Zero to One -The Hard Thing About Hard Things -Lean customer development -Lost and founder -Lean B2B -From Impossible to Inevitable -Traction Best computer science books: -Competitive programming 3 -Structure and interpretation of computer programs Best for fun (non-fiction): -Meditations -Sapiens -How to win friends and influence people -A brief history of time -Self-reliance -Frente a la estrella polar

Hackers and Painters

- The Pragmatic Programmer - The Practice of Programming - The Mythical Man Month - The Cathedral and the Bazaar - The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Introduction to Algorithms - Hackers and Painters Some of these do contain mixed language code examples, but they are expressed in a way to be agnostic. A problem is a problem; in any language.

I just finished reading the Pragmatic Programmer for the first time and felt that it was pretty much a letdown. For one, it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence (even though I think it's mostly right, and that empirical evidence for some of their claims exists). Two, I feel like an undergraduate software course covers 75% of the material in the book (at least mine did). Maybe people have learned since it was first published, or maybe I've just worked on pretty good teams that practiced the stuff, but nothing in there was ground breaking or made me a better developer. Three, there was a lot of filler in the book, summaries, talking about future, and past chapters, etc that added no value except to inflate the page count. I feel like Pragmatic Programmer would be a good book to read before starting your first job, or maybe your undergraduate year of college. I was going to start Code Complete next, but Pragmatic Programmer was so disappointing I decided to read fiction for the next few weeks instead. So to answer your question, the best language agnostic development books I've read are:…

This is going to sound like sucking up on hacker news but.... Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. It is the reason I looked into lisp. A very entertaining read that made me change my opinion on several political issues.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I'd also strongly recommend Terry P's Going Postal and Making Money. I have a long list of non-fiction books I've read and enjoyed. Most recently, I read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters. Would definitely recommend it!

1. Guns, Germs, and Steel 2. Hackers and Painters (expected to see this more here)

This brings up a good point. What would it take to put "Hackers and Painters" and "Founders at Work" onto CD? I can't imagine anything I'd rather listen to. And both are perfect for short trips because each chapter is stand-alone.

Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki How to Get Rich - Felix Dennis Differentiate or Die - Jack Trout and of course... Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston Hackers and Painters - Paul Graham

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham I am NOT recommending these because I am an avid hacker.news participant. I became an avid hacker.news participant AFTER reading these books.