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…
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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…
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…
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks by Luc Perkins
Rating: 8.4/10. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement by Luc Perkins Book exploring seven different, mostly NoSQL databases. Each database gets about 40-50 pages and is split into three days: the first day covers basic operations like setup, inserting, querying, and deleting; the second day goes into…
Modern CSS with Tailwind by Noel Rappin
Rating: 7.6/10. Modern CSS with Tailwind: Flexible Styling Without the Fuss by Noel Rappin A short book of around 80 pages, covering the basics of Tailwind CSS, a modern utility framework. Tailwind simplifies various aspects of CSS, making a book on it relatively concise. While online documentations cover this content, having it presented in book…
Modern Front-end Architecture by Ryan Lanciaux
Rating: 8.1/10. Modern Front-end Architecture: Optimize Your Front-end Development with Components, Storybook, and Mise en Place Philosophy by Ryan Lanciaux A fairly short book about modern frontend development centered around building components. The first part of the book introduces the concept of components and the benefits of having a consistent set of reusable components. It…
A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
Rating: 8.5/10. A fairly short book on aspects of software engineering and design, especially on how to manage complexity. At 170 pages, it is very short and more opinionated than some larger tomes like Code Complete, some of the advice is not universally agreed upon by all software engineers, but they are well reasoned. This…
The Color of Air by Gail Tsukiyama
Rating: 7.8/10. A historical novel set in Hilo, Hawaii in 1935 and centers around the Japanese community there. The story follows Daniel, a young doctor who returns after a brief trip to the mainland United States. There is not much of a plot, rather the book mostly revolves around Daniel rediscovering his family’s past and…
This is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila
Rating: 7.9/10. A set of 6 short stories that take place in modern Hawaii. The people in each story are different, but all of them depict struggles, sadness, and despair, aiming to dispel the myth that Hawaii is a paradise. These stories showcase the everyday challenges that normal Hawaiians face, even though they may appear…
Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy
Rating: 8.5/10. Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook by Peter Kazanjy Book about how to do sales from first principles, for the founder of a startup who has never done sales before. The approach to startup sales is different from that of a bigger company, and you should do work that doesn’t scale. Firstly,…
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Rating: 7.7/10. Fairly short science fiction novel, it begins like a historical novel with a young man settling on Vancouver Island in the early 20th century, which, at the time, was still sparsely populated. The first half of the book jumps between four characters in different centuries in a slice-of-life style, taking place in 1912,…