Reading list for those who love to learn

by sivers • 17 years ago

118 88 17 years ago

TriinT15• 17 years ago

IMHO, this list contains only BS books. Tim Ferriss? Seth Godin? Malcolm Gladwell? Please. This is a list for those who need self-help and "motivation" books. Only exception is Livingston's F@W. The rest is pretty much junk.

Please allow me to write down my personal list for those who love to learn:

- The Art of Computer Programming

- Algorithms (by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani)

- Algorithm Design (by Kleinberg and Tardos)

- Feynman Lectures on Physics

- Landau & Lifschitz's series

- Vladimir Arnold's books on ODEs and Classical Mechanics

- Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (by Berlekamp et al.)

- Elements of Information Theory (by Cover & Thomas)

- Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (by MacKay)

- Network Optimization (by Bertsekas)

- Convex Optimization (by Boyd & Vandenberghe)

- Nonlinear Control Systems (by Isidori)

- Visual Complex Analysis (by Needham)

- Lasers (by Siegman)

- Game Theory (by Fudenberg & Tirole)

- Trading and Exchanges (by Harris)

Plus a bunch of books on Classical Mechanics, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Differential Geometry, Real Analysis, Algebra, Theoretical CS, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Cellular Biology, Evolution, Game Theory, Mechanism Design, Auction Theory, Economics, Finance, etc. That would be a reading list worth considering! It would also take a lifetime to read all the books...

phugoid• 17 years ago

Couldn't agree more.

Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi is a little jewel.

TriinT15• 17 years ago

I didn't know Fermi's book. Thanks for the suggestion :)

CodeMage• 17 years ago

This seems to be a trend in our society. Hard knowledge is too often considered secondary to "metaknowledge": motivation, time management, self-help (like Billy Connolly said, it's not self-help if someone else wrote the book to help you, it's just help).

Or maybe this was just a ploy by OP to squeeze some money out of that Amazon Associates Program ;)

aswanson• 17 years ago

I don't think the OP is in need of money, at least the few coins you get from Amazon programs:

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2008/10/derek-sivers-go.html

xenophanes4• 17 years ago

I'd add

Conjectures and Refutations (Karl Popper)

The Fabric of Reality (David Deutsch)

Also Feynman has some shorter/easier but serious physics books that some might prefer: QED and The Character of Physical Law. And his computation lectures book is good.

Confusion2• 17 years ago

Don't read Popper without also reading 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn and 'Against Method' by Paul Feyerabend. Those critiques of Popper put his philosophy in a much clearer light. Both contain extremely pertinent historical facts about the Galilean, Newtonian and Einsteinian revolutions.

TriinT15• 17 years ago

Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality is cool. I prefer Greene's The Elegant Universe, though.

menloparkbum• 17 years ago

It's interesting that he read all the books on his list (he has notes about each one) and was still a success. Most of the people I know who have reading lists like this are a personal and professional mess.

On the other hand, I've never met any rich person with a reading list like yours, but quite a few of my professors had bookshelves like that. Whether or not they actually read any of those books I'll never know. I know I've never gotten through more than about 50 pages of The Art of Computer Programming.

eugenejen2• 17 years ago

My first boss (who was pretty good in forth hacking) told me not to spend too much time to read Knuth's books. He said those books are great, but people who read them tends to not able to write great programs. He advised me to try to finish some stuffs that works and learn from it.

I thought he was joking. but later I know any one can learn a lot when doing a significant project of his/her own! In reality. Knuth had to learn to program computers by himself then because few was programming computers then, he can only rely on his own mind, logic and experiment to write better programs and later he tried to summarize what he had learned in "textbook" and deliver them to us, and we know most of time, it takes more text to say it clear than do it.

Of course Knuth is not ignorant of fundamental stuffs. But probably the only way to gain knowledge in any unknown territory is to explore them directly. It maybe dangerous but it is the only way.

ambition• 17 years ago

I am intensely curious about your point. Is it that you think reading is a not-terribly-productive use of effort, or do you take issue with the specific books? If it's the latter, which books do you recommend?

Confusion2• 17 years ago

Most of the people I know who have reading lists like this are a personal and professional mess.

Yes, but they read those books, because they are a mess. They aren't a mess because of reading those books... I hope.

arthurk• 17 years ago

I would also add "Don't Make Me Think" to the non-junk list. Great book about web usability.

zzzmarcus5• 17 years ago

Aside from Founders at Work, how many of the others that you're calling BS and junk have you read?

TriinT15• 17 years ago

Actually, I have read a bunch of them. They're good airport reads. I can't read Feynman during a flight with the babies crying and the roar of the engines, but I can read Godin, Taleb, etc for entertainment. Those books teach nothing deep, but I never said they didn't have entertaining value. Fluffy, non-nutritious, yet entertaining...

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

A great list for the hardcore scientist or mathematician, but I'm not sure about the value of (say) Convex Optimization for a wider audience :)

I find the Economist book reviews (or if you're pressed for time, their end-of-year roundup) a great balance of accessibility and intellectual depth.

TriinT15• 17 years ago

I agree. It is my personal list, and I make no claims that the list is suitable to other people, let alone to a wider audience.

However, I believe that not all of these books are for the hardcore mathematician / scientist. For example, I think everyone would benefit from reading Fudenberg & Tirole's book on Game Theory, which allows one to understand strategic interactions (which are abundant in Economics and Public and Foreign Policy, for instance). Moreover, the Simplex algorithm is used by many people who don't know how the algorithm works or why. A couple of chapters of Convex Optimization would be educational.

xiaoma• 17 years ago

I agree with you about several of those books, but The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less - by Barry Schwartz, was excellent. His work at Swarthmore was far from "junk".

Here's a link to his TED talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_par...

Elepsis• 17 years ago

With all due respect, what are 99 percent of people gaining from a book on, say, convex optimization? Yes, these are great choices if you're looking to become an expert on, say, physics. But not everyone is a physicist, nor does everyone need to be.

The point of the books on that list is that they are applicable to _many_ situations. You're not going to get oodles of "hard knowledge" from them, and I think people who go into them with that expectation are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Rather, they present some anecdotes -- some interesting, and some not -- and say "Okay, now think about these, and see if any of them can affect the way you do things." If you read a business book and don't bother to do the thinking/applying afterwards, you are, indeed, wasting your time.

The books on your list are ones that you go through, finish (though honestly, if you're just reading those books cover to cover and enjoying yourself, you're a better person than me... I'd use them as a reference at best) and can say "okay, I've learned something." The books on the original article's list are ones where once you've finished the book, you've only started learning.

TriinT15• 17 years ago

"With all due respect, what are 99 percent of people gaining from a book on, say, convex optimization? Yes, these are great choices if you're looking to become an expert on, say, physics. But not everyone is a physicist, nor does everyone need to be."

Convex Optimization for physicists??? Whaaaat? OK, consider Game Theory, Machine Learning, Operations Research. All have practical value and all require optimization. In fact, Machine Learning is mostly applied optimization theory. The Simplex algorithm is used all the time, in the most various industries. Yet once again, the need to know a bit of optimization theory is made evident.

Physicists don't really require the kind of optimization on Boyd's book. Unless one is an experimental physicist and needs to analyze data sets. Theoretical physicists usually work with infinite-dimensional optimization, i.e., variational analysis. I entirely agree that not everyone is a physicist, nor does everyone need to be... but picking Convex Optimization as an example was a poor choice.

The list is my personal list. It's a personal thing, and as such, it is non-transmissible. I am not trying to preach. I couldn't care less if the masses read junk...

mquander• 17 years ago

"With all due respect, what are 99 percent of people gaining from a book on, say, convex optimization?"

The headline doesn't say "reading list for 99% of people." It says "Highly recommended reading list for those who love to learn." If you love to learn, then (I haven't read the book, so grain of salt) you're getting a well-written introduction to an interesting field of study.

timwiseman• 17 years ago

You have some good points, but many of those books on that list help people learn to truly think deeply, not just read and briefly consider anecdotes. It is that deep, rigorous, logical thought that is valuable to virtually everyone (and certainly everyone who claims to love to learn) that is more important than the contents of those books.

Also, some of them (game theory in particular) are broadly applicable to and by most people who put the time and effort in to properly learning them.

dinkumthinkum2• 17 years ago

Most of those books are from the Jibber Jabber industry with a couple exceptions, perhaps "Don't Make Me Think." I agree with another commenter that the title is about books for those who love learning not books that would be applicable to many situations if you what you need are vacuous anecdotes. Vacuous anecdotes don't build bridges, solve concurrency problems, enrich anyone's philosophical depth or anything like that.

absconditus• 17 years ago

While I agree with your opinion of the submitted list, I feel your list is a bit unbalanced. Why only math, science and economics?

A few random suggestions:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/06712...

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century by Neil Postman

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Bridge-18th-Century-Improve/d...

jimbokun• 17 years ago

MacKay's side by side table comparing his book with Harry Potter made me laugh out loud just now:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html

He makes a pretty good case that his is the better textbook.

TriinT15• 17 years ago

For an academic, MacKay seems to have a great sense of humor :)

mediaman2• 17 years ago

In Derek's defense, several of the books he listed do have specific, harder knowledge, such as "Predictably Irrational" (written for the lay person, but cites many high quality studies), "Stumbling on Happiness" (same, covers much good research), "The Innovator's Solution", which contains a lot of high quality thought about how industries change, Bernstein's "The Four Pillars of Investing" (again, backed by good financial theory), and "Fooled by Randomness" (less original than it proclaims, but its fundamental perspective of the outcome of chaotic processes is useful for people not familiar with stats).

Yes, there are fluff books in there (Gladwell, Godin, etc) but you seem to be dismissing a lot of quality work just because you feel everyone should be reading hard theoretical material.

However, I do agree that it's easy to read only books such as those on Sivers' list and ignore those on your list, which is a mistake. A mix is healthy.

billswift• 17 years ago

"Innovator's Solution" is okay, but Christensen's first one "The Innovator's Dilemma" was better. Also Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds" provides a better survey of the field than any of the more technical books I've read.

rsheridan6• 17 years ago

>Only exception is Livingston's F@W

So you've read (even a review of) every single one of these books?

stinkytaco2• 17 years ago

Both the OPs list and your list, and everyone else’s list for that matter seem, for lack of a better term, white collar.

What about books not for the academic but for the eminently practical? Books on gardening, needlecraft, cooking or auto mechanics, for example? Do people who work with their hands not like to learn? Or do they just not hang out at HN?

TriinT15• 17 years ago

For each, his own. I like working with my hands. Personally, I am into carpentry. It's relaxing and I like to see stuff being build. It just happens that carpentry is learned by doing (especially from someone who knows more), not by reading. Science and Math is fun. Building stuff is also fun. I see no contradiction...

Alex39172• 17 years ago

That's interesting, because I liked a bunch on the original list but I'd probably consider most of the books you listed to be junk. To me this looks like the kind of list you'd put together if you wanted to look intelligent, but weren't actually intellectually curious. The only common thread among the books you've listed is that they're all hard to understand, but the questions most of them answer are rather banal.

TriinT15• 17 years ago

My good sir, if you do think Feynman, Knuth, Cover, Isidori, etc are junk, then you are a monster. What you have just said is equivalent to saying that van Gogh's works are just boring blobs of paint, or that Lord Byron didn't know how to write.

These books are the finest examples of condensed knowledge mankind has ever been able to produce. Sure, they are VERY hard to read, but 1000s and 1000s of years of accumulated scientific and intellectual progress should not be easy to absorb. These books are enough for a lifetime of reading.

My list of books will still be relevant in 1000 years, while the OP's reading list will be worthless in less than a 100 years. Deep knowledge does not get stale. Don't you see the common thread among the books I have listed? Here it is: they are all "bibles" in their respective fields.

edb• 17 years ago

Ah, blow me (and I say that in the friendliest way possible :). I'm of the personal (key word) opinion that Vonnegut NEEDS to be on anybody's learning list. The point, however, is that people who love to learn need nothing more than a heightened sense of curiosity, not some bullshit reading list that attempts to validate how smart they are.

TriinT15• 17 years ago

I read Vonnegut, too. I don't think I have learned anything "deep" from his books, but I love them nonetheless. Art is art. Science is science. Both are needed.

GHFigs2• 17 years ago

IMHO

You're not being humble, you're being arrogant. Did you not notice that the list was overwhelmingly about business and marketing? Did it not occur to you that it was targeted at people other than you? Was it really humble of you to dismiss all but one of them as "junk" and "BS" without considering that context?

TriinT15• 17 years ago

Business and marketing are learned by doing. I have never heard of Jobs reading marketing books. Godin, Gladwell, etc are for the sheep. I remember reading that Jurvetson read poetry and philosophy books instead of business books. Draw your own conclusions.

My list is personal. I don't claim it's for everyone. It's what interests me, period. It's the stuff worth learning. There are other great books I could include there, from Byron to Vonnegut, but literature is not deep knowledge, it's art.

muhamm2• 17 years ago

I really like Derek Sivers' blog but I have an issue about affiliate linking. Maybe it's just my issue but when I see Amazon affiliate links for all of the books on this list, it makes me hesitant to click them. Call me crazy perhaps.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

Fully agree - a one liner at the top of the page saying 'you can help support this blog by buying from this link' or so takes only a moment and fully informs the visitor.

I did think the list of books would be better described as 'how-to' rather than educational. There are some great choices (and I own a few of them) but educational suggests something a little more intellectual and less of the moment.

Re: 'The Obsolete Employee' Very instructive, but also good perspective like how until the industrial revolution, there were no employees: everyone was freelance.

Really! Who knew feudal Europe was such an entrepreneurial paradise :)

sivers• 17 years ago

My old version of that page had a blurb about how I've included the ISBN number for every book there, so you can use your local library, bookmooch.com, or any book-lookup service you want.

I took away the blurb because it felt like a lot of "blah blah blah" and giving the ISBN was self-explanatory. But the old blurb is back now.

No need to click the Amazon links. That was definitely not the point of the page.

tjr• 17 years ago

I for one find text-based Amazon affiliate links to be just about the most non-intrusive form of making money on the web.

byrneseyeview3• 17 years ago

Why go to the extra effort to be offended?

muhamm2• 17 years ago

Not sure what you mean.

dinkumthinkum2• 17 years ago

There sure are a lot of posts going to this web site on HN lately. These are all exactly the kinds of books I don't like. The only one I have considered reading is "Getting Things Done."

luckyland• 17 years ago

Did you just return from an executive retreat? Not the list of books I was expecting.

callmeed2• 17 years ago

I've really been digging Sivers's blog, but he lost me at Ferriss on this one ...

wvl• 17 years ago

Yeah, he lost me at Ferriss as well. And when he got to "The China Study", well... http://robbwolf.com/?p=300

ryanwaggoner2• 17 years ago

Have you read 4HWW? Did you seriously find nothing of value?

callmeed2• 17 years ago

I listened to the audio tape version all the way through.

The small nuggets I did find of value were few and far from original. Read David Allen, Thoreau, or the book of Ecclesiastes.

zzzmarcus5• 17 years ago

I've read quite a few of the books on the list, the ones that have stayed with me and actually changed my life are, in order of impact:

1. The Art of Learning - I'll never think about practice the same way.

2. Getting Things Done - Enough has been said about this elsewhere, but the whole concept of "what's the next action" has really worked for me.

3. E-Myth Revisited - This was my MBA in one book. It came at the right time for me and really changed the way I think about creating businesses as assets. I wasn't a fan the cheesy example of the pie shop, but the advice has been invaluable.

Others that I found interesting, and that changed the way I think were:

4-hour Work Week. Yes, there is a ton of hype around this book, but I'd be surprised if anyone read it with an open mind and didn't learn anything or come away motivated to experiment with their lifestyle.

Outliers. This one probably stands out to me since I read it so recently. Gladwell gets a lot of hype as well, but I think he deserves at least some of it.

The Culture Code drastically changed the way I think about marketing.

And, a few random notes on the others I've read:

I found Predictably Irrational, Brain Rules and The 48 Laws of Power to be mostly garbage.

The Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics and Made to Stick are decent essays in book form.

Stumbling on Happiness is not nearly as good as Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis which would be in the first list I made above if it were on Siver's list.

Seth Godin's books are good for motivation and for changing the way you think about marketing, especially if you've been doing it for a long time (I haven't). They're quick and fun, I think they're worth reading.

Fooled By Randomness is worth reading if nothing else because Taleb is such an entertaining writer.

deepakjois• 17 years ago

FWIW, here is my reading list http://deepak.jois.name/books categorized into different topics.

I am primarily interested in programming and tech, but I have tried to spread my readings into a wide range of topics, which I believe is a good thing.

scscsc• 17 years ago

Well, the guy is pretty smart. The books are likely to appeal to certain people and they will hurry and buy them and he'll make some cash. I was surprised it got to the first page.

TheSOB882• 17 years ago

Seriously. I mean, only an idiot wouldn't want to buy "Personal Development for Smart People".

oscardelben2• 17 years ago

Why would anyone be an idiot by reading that book?

lispm• 17 years ago

hmm, could that list not be replaced by one book?

  Common Sense for Dummies

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

I'm a bit skeptical about some of the books (I don't know much about Seth Godin for example), but at least some some of them are good. James Surowiecki, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Dan Ariely are all well worth the read (though I would have chosen Black Swan instead of Fooled by Randomness), and I already ordered the first one on the list - Philip Zimbardo is an impressive name. Oh, and Barry Schwartz too, haven't read the book but I've seen him on TED.

Overall it's a list worth selecting from.

joubert• 17 years ago

The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype (Richard Dawkins)

slvrspoon• 17 years ago

this list is for people who know very little about what learning constitutes.

Ardit203• 17 years ago

would you like to elaborate on that?

Ardit203• 17 years ago

I was a bit disappointed seeing this list tbh. I thought wow cool before getting there and once I landed I was like, gee dude, love to learn?

I think the people who love to learn have a big problem, that is there is so many interesting things that we would love to learn, hence a list like this, although to start with was met with, well why should I have this guy tell me what to read, but I thought I might get some cool book, you know one of those which changes the way you think.

For me, there have been a few books which have changed the way I think, as they were at different stages of my life, their difficulty rating varies.

The first book to change my way of thinking is "a beginners guide to ideas". I suggest this book as a present for smart, but deeply devoted religious people. This is a very "basic" book and mostly introduces a beginner to the history of philosophy.

The second book, in a time line order, would be (I do not remember the title exactly) something like WWI and why it happened. This book undercovered the deeper reasons and explained how the surface stories connect with them.

I think the winner would have to be a book about Nitzches works, the different way that this guy saw reality, I think shed some light on our nature and some deeper hidden reasons for things like morality.

A designers book for non designers was just superb, simple, yet deep.

Now am reading ancient rhetorics for contemporary students which is helpful for me right now for its emphasise on thoroughness which I had ignored.

Another book was about the complete history of human beings, which taught me that we prefer to improve what we have, therefore lay layer upon layer, and by association create immense complexity, when there are much more simple ways of doing things. The examples were the ancient calendars and their numerical systems.

I could go on, however what I think these books have in common is one, they introduce you to a completely new field of study, two they are written by people who taught the subject for years, hence they know how to teach, how many and which basic things to include and at what pace to progress to complexity. Another thing they have in common is that these books get lost haha, even their titles, however they do remain in my memory and what I have learned from them will probably be taken to the grave.

An egocentred opinion may follow, however I would suggest that the people who love to learn love to learn many things, yet not necessarily in great detail, that is what specialism and our job is for. Therefore I was enthusiastic by this list, yet very disappointed by it content.

Reading list for those who love to learn

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