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…
Category: Topics
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…
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…
Health Care Operations Management by Langabeer and Helton
Rating: 7.5/10. Health Care Operations Management: A Systems Perspective by James R. Langabeer II, Jeffrey Helton Textbook about healthcare operations, primarily focuses on hospitals in the United States. Several chapters were invaluable, providing specific information about how healthcare works and definitions of commonly used terms in the industry, such as ratios for reasoning about operational…
Learning React by Alex Banks and Eve Porcello
Rating: 7.9/10. Learning React: Modern Patterns for Developing React Apps by Alex Banks and Eve Porcello This is a good introductory book on React that starts from the basics, including JavaScript and React components, then goes on to explain the usages of many different React hooks, how they work, and in what situations they should…