Rating: 7.8/10. Book examining many aspects of life throughout history, with a focus on energy use. Energy may be considered a kind of universal currency that determines the quality of life across very different periods, from prehistoric societies to agriculture, the industrial revolution, and today. As civilization has advanced, we’ve gotten better at harnessing new…
Author: Lucky
What to Listen For in Music by Aaron Copland
Rating: 7.6/10. Book about how to appreciate classical music, especially 20th-century modern music, written by influential American classical composer Aaron Copland. It’s written at a level that does not assume much prior understanding of music, even though it makes use of some musical notation. Often, people ask how to understand music, in short, there is…
Design for Hackers by David Kadavy
Rating: 8.0/10. Book that breaks down the principles of design and explain the theoretical foundations of design aspects such as typography, composition, and color, meant for an engineer who likes to have rules to follow. The book is filled with images and graphics, making it a relatively quick read. It also provides interesting historical information…
Tim: The Official Biography of Avicii by Mans Mosesson
Rating: 7.3/10. Biography of Swedish EDM artist Avicii, real name Tim Bergling, was a relatively shy teenager, who grew up in a wealthy neighborhood in Stockholm. In high school, at the age of 16, he discovered FL Studio with some friends who were also interested in making EDM music. He became quite good at making…
Generative Deep Learning by David Foster
Rating: 8.3/10. Generative Deep Learning: Teaching Machines to Paint, Write, Compose, and Play by David Foster Book covering the fundamentals of all the major generative AI models, focusing on image generation such as VAE, GAN, diffusion models, etc. It presents relatively little math and uses Keras code to demonstrate how to train and run each…
Designing Web APIs by Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, Amir Shevat
Rating: 8.0/10. Designing Web APIs: Building APIs That Developers Love by Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, Amir Shevat A fairly short book about best practices for designing web APIs to be easy to use and maintainable, written by three engineers who worked on the Slack API integration, which has been a successful marketplace for apps. Chapter…
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr
Rating: 8.4/10. Classic science fiction novel, won the Hugo Award, written in the 1950s, portraying the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse that spans several millennia, it has three parts, the first is 600 years after present and each part is another 600 years in the future. The novel explores how humanity undergoes dark ages, a…
The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow
Rating: 7.3/10. The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow Book about subscription businesses, the advantages of subscriptions over traditional revenue models, and strategies to succeed in this business model. It is fairly generic, offering advice that applies to no specific industry, but useful for any entrepreneurs looking to consider…
Identity-Native Infrastructure Access Management by Kontsevoy, Shah, Conrad
Rating: 7.1/10. Identity-Native Infrastructure Access Management: Preventing Breaches by Eliminating Secrets and Adopting Zero Trust by Ev Kontsevoy, Sakshyam Shah, Peter Conrad Book about security best practices is aimed at enterprise and large-scale systems, with the goal of protecting cloud infrastructure in the most secure way. It also aims to prevent the accidental sharing of…
Wanderers, Kings, Merchants by Peggy Mohan
Rating: 8.3/10. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages by Peggy Mohan Book about the languages of India and its history, written by a linguistics researcher, focusing on language change and how languages evolved through contact over time. It is an enjoyable read for anybody interested in linguistics, especially about languages that…
Immigration in the 21st Century by Givens, Navarre, Mohanty
Rating: 7.2/10. Immigration in the 21st Century: The Comparative Politics of Immigration Policy by Terri Givens, Rachel Navarre, Pete Mohanty A academic book that discusses the history and politics of immigration, with a primary focus on the US, Australia, and Canada, and countries in Europe, including Britain, France, and Germany. It explores how these countries…
The Canadian Regime by Malcolmson, Myers, Baier, Bateman
Rating: 8.6/10. The Canadian Regime: An Introduction to Parliamentary Government in Canada by Patrick Malcolmson, Richard Myers, Gerald Baier, Tom Bateman Textbook that explains the structure, principles, and patterns of legal processes in the Canadian democratic government system. It includes the constitution, political policies, various parts of the government, and how they make decisions. The…