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This is a list of books I like (the page is still not complete).
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
If you are an engineer, you will appreciate this book. It tries to
explain the problems of life interms of engineering
concepts. Sometimes the author leans too much on the philosophical
side and he starts using big, hairy words. Frankly, I skipped a few
sections :-) .
One of my favourite passage from that book is quoted below
When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to
mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer...slow, tedious
lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five
times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic's
techniques, but you know in the end you're going to get it. There's
no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand
up to it. When you've hit a really tough one, tried everything,
racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time
Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, ``Okay, Nature,
that's the end of the nice guy,'' and you crank up the formal
scientific method.
For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down,
formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you've
been, where you're going and where you want to get. In scientific
work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise
the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and
forget what you know and what you don't know and have to give up. In
cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion
starts it's a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal
and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems
straightens out your head as to what they really are.
The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down
into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as
to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each
hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed
results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of
the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement
of many college and high-school lab notebooks but the purpose here
is no longer just busywork. The purpose now is precise guidance of
thoughts that will fail if they are not accurate.
The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't
misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually
know. There's not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who
hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on
guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical
information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or
go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here
and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does
it often enough anyway even when you don't give it
opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical
when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific
edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine
and you can get hung up indefinitely.
Philip K. Dick
I can read any of his books.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
This is a science fiction comedy. This book follows the adventures of
Arthur Dent, an Englishman who escapes the destruction of Earth with
his friend Ford Prefect, an alien and researcher for the "Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy". My favourite passage from the book is
After seven and a half million years of pondering the question,
Deep Thought provides the answer: "forty-two".
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for
seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite
definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest
with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Richard Feynman is one of my heroes. This has a number of personal
and mostly humorous anecdotes from his life, most of them showing his
curiosity about things and willingness to try new things.
Terry Pratechett's Discworld series
Admittedly, I have read only a few books from the series, but I liked
them quite a lot.
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction - Steve C. McConnell
So, you want to know what good comments should look like ? Or how to
write go od comments ? or choose good function names ? This is the
book for that. Very well written and written keeping a programmer in
mind. Here is an excerpt from the book - on
Why you need to create functions
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