Ask HN: Most influential books you read growing up

26 points by hexagonc 9 years ago | 25 comments

While reading the post, "The Domain-Driven Design Paradox" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13520209), I was reminded of a book that I enjoyed as a kid, called The Paradoxicon [1] by Nicholas Falletta. This was where I learned about the works of M.C. Escher and Moebius strips. I didn't originally own this book; instead, I had checked it out from the library. I eventually bought the book in college out of nostalgia and was hoping to thumb through it again after reading the article above, only to realize it was not on my bookshelf. I was considering buying it again and was reminded of all the other technical books that were influential to me as I was growing. What technical books did you love as you grew up? Bonus points if you have the title as an adult. Even more points if it is the same book that you grew up with.

[1] - www.goodreads.com/book/show/2521223.The_Paradoxicon

colanderman 9 years ago |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work

Probably the single most influential on my technical education. Each page made me feel like I was inside the machines.

hexagonc 9 years ago | |

I had this book, too. It was given to me as a Christmas present along with the Star Trek Next Generation Technical Manual[1].

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Next-Generation-Technical/d...

qubex 9 years ago | | |

Again, yup! To this day I can remember that warp coil plasma injectors work their way up to a maximum frequency of 50Hz at about Warp 8 and then merely keep increasing warp plasma flow. ;)

qubex 9 years ago | |

Yup! My father gave me a copy in 1992 and as late as 1997 I used the mammoth-infested diagram of a half-adder (the only depiction I had access to in my teenage pre-internet-connection days) to build a 4-bit full adder out of discrete logic.

tmaly 9 years ago |

I had a few books growing up that I came across that I really enjoyed.

Getting Started with Electronics was a Radio Shack book I owned that I used to learn the basics of circuits.

Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman was a book I came across back in high school that opened my eyes more to self teaching / learning and curiosity.

Later on in college I came across How to Solve it by Polya that opened my eyes up to ways to approach problem solving.

I also stumbled on Thinking as a Science by Henry Hazlitt which had a great approach to learning something new.

hexagonc 9 years ago | |

Getting Started with Electronics -- wow! I think I read that one as a kid, as well. I grew up in the eighties so Radio Shack was still (I think) a good place to buy electronic components and equipment. I remember the electronics kits and educational books that they had. A lot of the Radio Shack electronics books were printed on graph paper and looked like they were taken directly from an engineer's lab notes, informal font style and all. As a kid, I remember being bemused by this style since I had not seen it used anywhere else.

tmaly 9 years ago | | |

I still have quite a few of those smaller books printed on the graph paper. I had a lot more fun building circuits compared to seeing kids today stuck on mobile phone.

theoneinskane 9 years ago |

Design for the real world by Victor Papanek. It was recommend reading for my design & technology GCSE course and it had a profound affect on the way I thought about design, form, function and just the holistic way in which we should try to live.

SBCRec 9 years ago |

Rich dad poor dad.

It got me thinking pro actively about money, paraphrasing "its not I CANT afford it, but HOW can I afford it".

chatmasta 9 years ago | |

I came here to say the same.

To be clear: there is a lot wrong with this book. I find the title to be abrasive and not reflective of the value of the content inside the book. The authors also never established any real credibility of domain expertise. The book reads a lot like a Malcom Gladwell version of financial education.

The book's strength is also it's weakness: it presents lessons as simplified parables without considering much nuance. For me as a young reader, this was valuable. Now, I'm not sure I would get as much value out of it because I would not be able to get past the many contradictions and flawed logic. But perhaps I wouldn't be able to read it critically if I had never read it in the first place.

I don't even remember the specific lessons. But I remember it providing many moments of clarity for my young mind to internalize.

hawkice 9 years ago | |

Same here. It's not a book overflowing with positive attributes, but it _did_ have a massive and positive impact on me as a child. The Rich Dad Poor Dad board game also had quite the impact, despite being poorly designed (as board games go).

elyrly 9 years ago |

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors - by Piers Paul Read

changed my whole perspective on life and jump started my love for reading

RUG3Y 9 years ago | |

That was a really great book.

BigAl 9 years ago |

Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

A friend of mine introduced it to me at school and we were both hooked. I recently bought it again as I wanted a copy for my kids!

rijoja 9 years ago |

Don't remember what books I read as a kid really but some book on political philosophy really messed with my mind that and some Swedish books on computer design and similar stuff. Not the same after that. Used to spend a lot of time at the library. But I have fond memories from the disc world series.

qubex 9 years ago |

The Computational Beauty of Nature (1997) by William Flake is the book that cemented my fascination with computation, computability, and computer science as having something fundamental to say about the physical universe in which we live.It probably sounds banal to all of you in this age but for a 16 year old steeped in high school physics and this mysterious ’calculus’ problems with their elegant closed form solutions the idea of the amount of actual calculating required to figure something out being relevant was... amazing.

laughfactory 9 years ago |

Not nearly as deep as everyone else, but I read all the Tom Swift books. And the Robotech books. These opened my imagination and made me think of the possibilities.

hexagonc 9 years ago |

I'll start by posting my own list of influential technical books:

The Paradoxicon [1] by Nicholas Falletta. As described in question above.

Computers and the Imagination by Clifford A. Pickover [2] - This book is filled with mathematical and computer related curiousities! I learned about fractals, and chaos, computer generated art and poetry and a whole bunch of, at time, interesting mathematical trivia. This is probably the first book that got me seriously interested in computer programming. This was basically an activity book for mathematics and computers.

Methods of Logic by W.V. Quine[3] - This stimulated my interest in symbolic logic and symbolic computation. I didn't read the whole book but I read enough to write a program on my HP-48 GX graphicing calculator to simplify symbolic propositional logic statements.

Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology by Steven Levy [4] - This was my first exposure to celluar automata in the form of John Conway's Game of Life. This books also inspired me to write a Game of Life program on my HP-48 GX.

God and the New Physics by Paul Davies [5] - I learned about the big bang theory and singularities and how the universe could exist without being created from this book. This may be the single most influential book I've ever read. It spurted my interest in physics and cosmology and was probably single-handedly responsible for my loss of religion.

Flim-Flam! by James Randi [6] - This is the book that made me a skeptic. Before reading this book around 6th grade, I was a hardcore believer in the occult. In fact, I had already read the Uri Geller book by Puharich [7] and happened to find this book in the same occult section of the library.

The Mind by John Rowan Wilson [8] - My 5th grade teacher happened to have this book in her classroom and let me borrow it. I had a hard time giving it back and decades (well, maybe one decade) later I somehow managed to track it down and buy it again. The book is from the 1960s, but there are some really good illustrations in it and I learned about Grey Walter and his robot tortoises from this book.

Creative Sciencing: Ideas and Activities for Teachers and Children by Alfred Devito [9] - This book is just awesome! My mom was a teacher when I was growing up and I remember finding this on the bookshelf that we had at home. There are lots of very fun science projects in this book. I won't claim to have done very many of them, but my favorite was the "rubber-band mobile" [10]. Although I love technology and gadgets and computers, it still saddens me that the desire for physical experimentation has waned in kids these days.

There were definitely other technical books that I loved but these are the ones that I think were the most influential as far as my career choices and outlook on life. They are not necessarily the best in their class and most are outdated now.

[1] - www.goodreads.com/book/show/2521223.The_Paradoxicon

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Computers-imagination-Visual-adventur...

[3] - https://www.amazon.com/Methods-Logic-Willard-Orman-Quine/dp/...

[4] - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/737831.Artificial_Life

[5] - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/263006.God_and_the_New_Ph...

[6] - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/662277.Flim_Flam_

[7] - find it yourself, I'm not providing links to this trash!

[8] - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135687.The_Mind

[9] - https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Sciencing-Activities-Teacher...

[10] - take a spool of thread and push a rubber band through the hole in its center, allowing the ends of the rubber band to protrude from both ends of the spool. On one end, slide a short matchstick through the rubber band loop, thus preventing the rubber from being pulled all the way through the spool. Create a washer out of hard bar soap or candle wax and carve a grove along its flat disk side. On the other end of the spool, thread the remainig rubber band loop through the soap washer and hold it in place with another match stick, allowing the match stick to settle into the grove that was cut in the soap washer. You now have a spool of thread with a rubber band threaded through the middle and held in place by a matchstick on one end and a soap washer and another match stick on the other. The matchstick on the soap washer acts as a key for winding up the rubber band, which itself acts like a spring. After winding the key up for 10 or 20 turns, place it on a table or any other flat surface. As the tension unwinds the rubber band, it also rotates the spool, causing the entire contraption to move.

telebone_man 9 years ago |

How to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie

I've always thought the title is a bit off putting, and to some the points are common sense.

But I find myself referring back to it for advice on how to handle a particular situation with a friend, colleague or client.

That's why I nicknamed it 'The Good Book'. :)

fratlas 9 years ago |

The Power of One (Children's version).

gadders 9 years ago | |

I read the adult version as a teenager. Awesome book.

thenormal 9 years ago |

Dostoevski (all of him)

probinso 9 years ago |

Calvin and Hobbes