27 Books Like Proving Ground

What I love about this short story collection by a true master of the writing craft is how psychedelic it is, without any actual references to drugs or counterculture.

Every story is a mind-bending trip delivered straight to the dome through innovative language and upended logic. I love the rabbit holes Borges sends his readers down, like the first story’s development of an entire other human civilization through the discovery of its never-ending encyclopedia.

The title Labyrinths is so fitting – reading these stories is like making your way through a literary maze with psychic surprises and twists around every turn of the page. 

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.… show more.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

During the early years of my career as a software developer, I regularly developed very small programs that would exercise parts of the system that I was working on back then. I realized very quickly that those small programs would save me a lot of time figuring out whether the changes that I made would actually work or not. Until at some point a colleague mentioned the concept of Test-Driven Development. I first did some experimentation, dipping a toe into the water to feel the temperature. It wasn’t until the first time I picked up this book that I jumped right in. From then moment on, it all made sense. Although this book was published back in 2002, for me it still is the book when it comes to the subject of Test-Driven Development.      

I’ve read a lot of books about programming; very few of them have made me laugh. None made me laugh as much as this book.

There’s one chapter where… nah, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Plus it has cartoons! Obviously, none of that would matter unless it also had interesting things to say about the practice of programming, but it’s packed full of interesting perspectives on all sorts of issues, from team dynamics to thinking about your career to an explicit consideration of the ethics of programming.

When we make games at Sucker Punch, we aim to “surprise and delight” the player—and that’s exactly what this book did for me.