Books like Proving Ground

I’m cheating a bit here because this one isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories by Argentina’s greatest writer.

Beautifully translated, it shows Borges at the height of his powers. I also got a sense throughout of the extraordinary range of his intellect – he certainly liked to show off.

Among my favourite stories are "The Garden of Forking Paths," which anticipates the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, "The Lottery of Babylon," a meditation on luck, "Three Versions of Judas," which comes to a shocking conclusion about who Judas was and why he betrayed Jesus, and "The Immortal," which shows us what a curse immortality would be. And I thought his description of a dream in Ragnarok was spot on.

This isn’t a book about biology, but it makes the list anyway. Genes, chemistry, and mechanics stretch our conception of life. Still, there’s more needed to make sense of it all: the emerging understanding that dynamic interactions, feedback loops, and a bit of randomness make life alive. We need more books that lay this out; this was one of my motivations for writing my book.

Philip Ball’s very recent How Life Works seems masterful, and I’m sure it would make this list if I were writing a month or two later, after I’ve finished reading it. But since I can’t list either my book or his, I’ll list Gleick’s book, one of the best popular science books ever. It dives into the science of order and chaos, from the turbulence of Jupiter’s red spot to the unpredictability of weather, with a bit of biological pattern formation in the mix.

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Full disclosure: Laura DeNardis is a good friend and former colleague of mine. But I was a fan before I was a friend, and thus far, The Internet In Everything is her crowning achievement, so I feel very comfortable listing it here as an absolute must-read.

When Laura told me she was going to write this book, my first thought was, “I wish I’d thought of that!” and my second thought, a nanosecond later, was, “Thank goodness I didn’t because she’ll do it a million times better.”

DeNardis is the reigning monarch of Internet Governance Studies, meaning she researches all the weird laws, policies, technologies, businesses, agencies, and practices that have built the internet and keep it ticking. You’d think the subject would be boring or impenetrable to us mere mortals, but her genius is in making it not only understandable but downright fascinating.

She understands the internet the way… show more.

André Brock gives no fucks and takes none. As an academic, so many of the books I read—even the good ones—are couched in cautious language and speak from an imaginary non-place of dispassionate objectivity. Brock throws all that out the window and writes an impassioned, embodied, joyful, agitated, confusing, brilliant, opinionated, insightful, and ultimately, empirically supportable book, in his own unmistakable voice, about how and why Black people use the internet.

Though the book has many valuable findings and has already changed the practice of internet studies since its publication, the thing I love most about it is Brock’s own playfulness and his celebration of the social and political value of playfulness.

His key point is that data aren’t objective or neutral and that computing machines aren’t cold and calculating (even if that’s their job). Data and computers, he argues, are made by people and used by people, and the… show more.

I really like this book because it's a thrilling tech story that gets you thinking about how technology might change our world. The book made me realize how powerful and risky AI can be. I love how fast-paced the story is and how it makes you consider issues of control and freedom.

The way the author talks about technology and its effects on people really got me thinking. The book makes you wonder about how society and technology come together, and it's interesting.

Wow! This book is exactly what every programmer has always wanted to know or even felt guilty about not knowing and it’s all presented in an extremely simplified and fun way. 

This is one of those books where you get excited in the morning when you wake up because you know you are going to be able to read more in the book and you are hoping the book will never end.

It’s rare to find a big book that I enjoyed reading so much and felt so short. This book covers almost everything you ever wondered about computer science. After reading this book, I felt like I finally understood everything a programmer was supposed to know and I no longer felt that nagging feeling of being an imposter.

When trying to become a better Java developer, there is so much to learn.

97 Things covers, well 97, of them in a series of brief essays. What’s cool is that the essays were written by different people so you get lots of points of view on what is important. Topics range from language (comments, fat jars) to the ecosystem (benchmarking, frequent releases) to the language-agnostic (definition of done and breaking down problems.)

Note that two of these are mine. The book is thin at just over 200 pieces. And since each “thing” is short, it’s easy to read on the go.

I was quite late in picking up this book after it got published in 2014. Turned out that this mistake was all mine. Although the book is very opinionated, this masterpiece is filled with many nuggets of wisdom when it comes to writing highly maintainable unit tests. There are lots of code examples to be found as well. The ideal book to read after Test-Driven Development By Example and Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests.

When people think about software engineering they mostly think about programming, but that’s not where a project starts. It starts with requirements.

(Really it sometimes starts with company politics, bickering, excuses, and backstabbing, but requirements gathering is often the official start.)

A good set of requirements keeps developers pulling in the same direction; a bad one can make the team inefficient, cause endless arguments, set developers against each other, and make the project feel like Lord of the Flies. I’ve seen projects scrapped and restarted from scratch or even canceled due to poor documentation.

Every software developer should know at least a little about writing so they can produce clear requirements and documentation.

This book isn’t specifically about writing documentation (which is something of an art in itself), but it can help you learn how to make your business writing more effective. This book won’t turn you into Shakespeare,… show more.

I've found this book to be instrumental in my career as a software engineer, especially because it's full of useful and practical advice on how to be effective and productive on a day-to-day basis, but it also includes actionable advice, and helped me a lot on thinking about my career long-term.