Rating: 7.5/10. Fairly short book that introduces readers to the Unicode standard and the pitfalls of encoding. It’s suitable for both programmers and linguists. It’s probably one of the shorter books on the topic that I’ve come across. However, it seems to focus more on topics of interest to linguists, and several important issues related…
Author: Bai Li
Visual Studio Code for Python Programmers by April Speight
Rating: 7.0/10. Book about the VS Code IDE, catered to Python programmers. It mostly covers basic operations with detailed step-by-step instructions and screenshots. However, I found the depth somewhat lacking. Most of the functions seem like things any seasoned IDE user would know. The book doesn’t go deeply into any particular feature, like launch configurations…
Introduction to Computer and Network Security by Richard R. Brooks
Rating: 8.0/10. Chapter 1: The History of Cryptography. Attempts to encode messages date back to ancient times. However, up until WW1, many of these encoding methods weren’t very effective. Codes were frequently cracked, and various issues often rendered messages unreadable due to coordination problems between the sender and receiver. WW2 marked a significant shift; with…
The Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz
Rating: 7.8/10. The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz Book about the economic challenges faced by artists of various types, including musicians, visual artists, writers, etc. Despite often being highly educated, artists are consistently among the lowest earners in the…
System Design Interview by Alex Xu
Rating: 8.0/10. System Design Interview – An insider’s guide by Alex Xu Book written to study system design interviews, offering several case studies of systems and how the author would have designed them. It also presents common patterns often used in these large distributed systems. In each case, while the final system can become quite…
Web Security for Developers by Malcolm McDonald
Rating: 8.3/10. Web Security for Developers: Real Threats, Practical Defense by Malcolm McDonald Book about web security, for developers looking to secure their apps. It offers best practices to prevent hacks; understanding security also sheds light on how various web architecture components are crafted and motivations for their design. Chapter 1: Hacking a website can…
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rating: 8.2/10. Historical novel by a Peruvian novelist about Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic for 31 years from 1930 to 1961. The book is largely based on true historical events and includes many real historical figures, but also introduces some fictional characters and events. These never conflict with what might have actually…
Real-World Next.js by Michele Riva
Rating: 8.1/10. Real-World Next.js: Build scalable, high-performance, and modern web applications using Next.js, the React framework for production by Michele Riva Book that introduces the most important features of Next.js, and gives some examples of building applications using this framework. It assumes some familiarity with web development and React, and also discusses various other useful packages…
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
Rating: 7.7/10. The Culture Map by Erin Meyer: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures Book about how cultures differ across the world, categorizing differences among cultures along eight dimensions. Cultural differences can often lead to misunderstandings without either side realizing it. This is especially important in management where your words…
The Nomadic Developer by Aaron Erickson
Rating: 7.3/10. The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting by Aaron Erickson Erickson Book about technology consulting firms, how their business works, and how to succeed in one. Essentially, consulting companies sell the hours of their consultants to clients. The sales team tries to add work to the “backlog” to…
Better Healthcare Through Math by Sanjeev Agrawal and Mohan Giridharadas
Rating: 8.2/10. Better Healthcare Through Math: Bending The Access And Cost Curves by Sanjeev Agrawal and Mohan Giridharadas Book about healthcare scheduling and operations written by a pair of consultants specializing in healthcare schedule optimization. Efficiency in healthcare is an important problem to tackle because the demand for healthcare will only increase in the next…
Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke
Rating: 8.6/10. Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd Edition: A Modern Introduction to Programming by Marijn Haverbeke A book that teaches the JavaScript programming language: the first half is about the core parts of the language itself, introducing basic control structures then more advanced topics like modules, objects, and promises. The second half is about how JS interacts…