| Title | Author | Progress | Thoughts | Last Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reinforcement Learning: an Introduction | Sutton & Barto | Chapter 9/17 | Written at an undergraduate level, this book betrays the elegance of the ideas behind Reinforcement Learning methods, including some advanced techniques. The Coursera Specialization associated with the book in an invaluable accelerant in learning the concepts without spending hours implementing environments. | 20200830 |
| How to Measure Anything | Douglas Hubbard | Completed | The approach Hubbard advocates for seems effective and well-defined, though getting buy-in from management isn't always straightforward, and some sections on actually performing the method are light on details (perhaps to get you to buy his consulting service!) | 20200701 |
| The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis | Ray Jain | Chapter 12/36 | The bible of performance analysis. Collects the basics of all aspects of an analysis into one book. Some sections read more like a reference than an education text. | 20191001 |
| Guerilla Capacity Planning | Neil Gunther | Chapter 4/11 | Lighter-weight methods than the previous for when a full-time performance analyst isn't justified (eg: agile-/sprint-based teams). | 20200801 |
| Practical Common Lisp | Peter Seibel | Chapter 10/32 | Common Lisp: an expression of how efficient high-level programming could be. Once the REPL/slime interaction have been set up and you learn to leverage lisp macros effectively, you truly can program at the speed of thought. I have not assessed the performance of the generated code, but anecdotally it seems very snappy. Is it possible to run a lisp that conforms to the platform ABI without boxing values? That is, can you interoperate with c/c++ without copying or converting data? | 20200830 |
| Hands on Machine Learning, 3ed | Aurélien Géron | Chapter 2/19 | Recommended by many as a good entry point to the practical side of the Machine Learning craze. The theory/heuristic background for the methods described is almost completely absent. I simply haven't made time to push far along this particular resource. | 20191001 |
| The Dao of Capital | Mark Spitznagel | Chapter 1/11 | Spitznagel's Universa Investments is an "insurance"-type fund that tries to address tail risk. In this book, the author defends his investment methodology through the use of numerous historical and literary references. So far, I am confused by his futures market-making example where his initial trading instructions don't seem to me to limit downside risk if the market moves too quickly. There are more applied resources on the fund's website. | 20200826 |
| Energy And Civilization | Vaclav Smil | Page 80/458 | A wet dream for those who like dimensional analysis. Smil collects statistics on the effective yield and loss of energy flows throughout history, including agriculture,industrial processes, and power extraction/generation. An eye-opener to the technological progress of human civilizations and the conveniences/costs thereof. | 20190315 |
| The AWK Programming Language | A very readable and informative introduction/reference to awk. This book is a gold standard for conversational technical writing. A limitation of awk I haven't overcome is handling binary data. It would be very nice if awk worked with a stream of tagged unions of c-structs. | |||
| Types and Programming Languages | Benjamin C. Pierce | Chapter 8/32 | This book was popular when I was first learning about programming languages and type systems for giving a well-rounded on worked introduction to the discipline. A couple of my co-workers on the Typescript team at Microsoft had read the book -- one was an editor of the book. | |
| Practical Foundations for Programming Languages | Robert Harper | This book is primarily a reference providing a consistent framework and notation for various concepts and constructs in programming language research. | ||
| Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman | Completed | A great introduction to programming with lists and lisp in the minimal "scheme" tradition. The exercises are very well chosen -- do every single one! | |
| generatingfunctionology | Herbert Wilf | Chapter 4/5 | An excellent second book for learning about combinatorics, describing the tool/technique of generating functions at a (mostly) undergraduate level. | |
| Analytic Combinatorics | Flajolet and Sedgewick | Page 50/778 | The study of combinatorics by looking at singularities of a combinatorial class' generating function, a map from the complex numbers to itself. This book takes the previous material to a much greater level of depth (covering the trees vs. the forest). So far, it reads very much like a reference and the examples/exercises vary in difficulty. A number of examples/exercises require results later in the book to prove. | |
| Statistics, 4ed | Freedman, Pisani, Purves | Page 376/576 | An introduction to Statistics at a high-school level, focusing on intuition building rather than formalism. The material of this book (mostly quite intuitive) would help anyone navigate our modern world. | 20181015 |
| Statistical Models: Theory and Practice, 2ed | David Freedman | Chapter 1/10 | The rigorous undergraduate sequel to the previous book. | |
| Statistical Models and Causal Inference: a Dialogue with the Social Sciences | David Freedman | Not started | A collection of articles (some available online) by Freedman regarding challenges and errors in applied statistical modeling. | |
| The Book of Why | Judea Pearl | Introduction read | A mostly-english (ie: minimal math notation) rendition of Pearl's causal inference formalism. | |
| Causality | Judea Pearl | Not started | A serious math/statistics textbook on causal inference. All of the three times I've opened up this book end with my head spinning. | |
| Linear Representations of Finite Groups | Jean-Pierre Serre | Chapter 6/17 | This book has three parts of very different levels of background assumed/difficulty. The first is a clean, conscise introduction to representations and characters. The later parts venture into more abstract territory with more demanding background, and I must admit my enthusiasm for unmotivated abstraction has waned as I have worked in industry. | 20141215 |
| Schaum's Outlines: Complex Variables | Spiegel et al. | Chapter 1/10 | Good preparation for a course in complex variables and the GRE -- it's good to get your hand's dirty with the nitty-gritty details. Following this with an elegant treatment of complex analysis like Stein & Shakarshi is great, but start here! | 20170815 |
| A Polynomial Approach to Linear Algebra | Paul Fuhrmann | Chapter 2/12 | I really wanted to like this book -- the level of difficulty was well-suited to my studies at the time and the notation/complexity seemed pretty clean and like a nice stepping stone into the next level of algebraic abstraction. Unfortunately, I found something like 10-20 typos and serious errors in the first chapter (preliminaries) and so my interest in continuing further diminished. I had drafted an email with errata to send to the author, but I can't find a copy of it now. | |
| Tartine Bread | Chad Robertson | Completed basic recipe once | The quality of bread you can bake at home following these recipes is very good. The commitment in terms of time is nothing to sneeze at though! | |
| What We Owe to Eachother | T. M. Scanlon | Page 84/361 | The theory of contractualism outlines in this book holds deep appeal to me; the idea that we should be restricted in our actions based on what we can justify to (reasonable) others sounds right. This is analytic-style philosophy: be prepared for 79 pages devoted to defining and defending the meaning of the word "reason". | |
| Design and Validation of Computer Protocols | Gerard Holzmann | Page 27/350 | This book covers is readable detail the elements and practice of designing protocols. From historical fire signals to the components to the OSI layer model today, protocols are a ubiquitious aspect of distributed systems and communication. Holzmann includes worked examples using his SPIN model checker tool. | |
| Street Fighting Mathematics | Sanjoy Mahajan | Chapter 2/6 | Problem solving tricks every math and engineering student could benefit from knowing. I would benefit from working through it in detail. | 20160301 |
| The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering | Sanjoy Mahajan | Not started | A follow-up to the previous book. | |
| Starting Strength | ||||
| Body by Science | ||||
| The Little Book of Common Sense Investing | ||||
| The Intelligent Investor | ||||
| A Random Walk Down Wall Street | ||||
| Devil Take the Hindmost | ||||
| A Random Walk Down Wall Street | ||||
| Beat the Market | Thorp & Kassouf | Chapter 7/14 | The original description of the structure and components of a hedge fund, this one designed around pricing errors in warrants on the secondary market, which are functionally equivalent to options. | |
| Futures, Options, and Other Derivatives | ||||
| Big Debt Crises | Ray Dalio | |||
| Unix: A History and a Memoir | Brian Kernighan | |||
| Let over Lambda | ||||
| The Art of the Metaobject Protocol | ||||
| Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming | ||||
| Nonviolent Communication | Marshall Rosenberg | Completed | Nonviolent Communication is a framework for expressing ourselves in a way that encourages us to hear the needs of others and for others to hear our needs. I find Rosenberg's suggestions really help cut through emotional barriers that prevent open communication. This book deserves to be read and re-read periodically (because I easily forget the ideas and slip into a "default" mode of interacting with others). The grammatical structure of his phrases is admittedly awkward, but I've found ways to smooth out the language while capturing the intention of his template. | |
| The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind | Julian Jaynes | Page 136/469 | I generally agree with the criticisms in this review that (i) "consciousness" is an incredibly overloaded term, and Jaynes' theory makes more sense when interpreted as speaking about having a theory of one's mind rather than literally lacking the capability for reflection, (ii) the evidence for localization of voices to separate hemispheres in the brain has not been affirmed, and (iii) Jayne's argument for the degree to which having the psychotechnology of a theory of mind seems to be overstated when comparing to non-Western cultures that may have lacked theory of mind until more recently, for which a firmer historical record is available. Still, the general idea that different individuals have different theories of mind both about themselves and others meshes well with my own experience. My understanding of myself and relationship with my emotions and desires has changed throughout my life. | |
| Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids | Bryan Caplan | Page 70/184 | I find the writing of economists, like psychologists, makes a sort of ergodicity assumption that I do not accept. In this way, I find many of the conclusions Caplan makes, such as the power of twin studies in demonstrating the relative unimportance or nurture, difficult pills to swallow. Marketing may misinform us to spend excessively on our children, but Caplan's argument seems a similar straw man. I have had similar reservations about other books, such as Scott Walker's "Why We Sleep" and the priming section of Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", where a large body of weak evidence is more confusing than clarifying. What is the right way to update your prior in response to many bad arguments? |