The stoic classics mentioned throughout these replies;

Reinventing the Sacred;

The Art of War;

Descarte's Error;

Free Will by Sam Harris

Introduction to Probability Theory

2) "how life imitates chess" Garry Kasparov

3) "how life imitates chess" Garry Kasparov

Highly recommended, very good read and smart book. I would call it the modern version of The Art of War.

And chapter III:

> It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles;

The Art of War is good, too, though.

I also like The Soul of a New Machine, The Prince, The Art of War and On Human Nature.

I found something akin, not so much "interactions" as in understanding the "why" about many human things, in reading Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

When we are able to attack, we must appear unable...

The amount of money you spend on one area of intelligence work versus some other area speaks volumes about your plans, priorities, capabilities, and so forth.

A great accomplishment with no waste of resources.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu is quite a read. Did you read it? Well.. your enemies are reading it.

I'm in the middle of Paulo Coelho's "The Zahir". The next one in line is
"Thinking, Fast and Slow", by Daniel Kahneman. I'm really looking forward to
that one!

From negotiations to strategy my boy Sun Tzu has never let me down.

Edit: Thanks for the clarification.

However, I did read "The Prince" and I think there's a lot most can learn from it. While I find the majority of the book reprehensible, there are many powerful people in our society that seem to think of it as a bible / instruction manual. Given the fact that such ideas still play a significant role in our society; I feel it is worthwhile to learn about them.

Title: Search Engine Hacking with Google, Bing & Shodan
Author: Enrique Rando

Pages: 272

Price: 20 Euros + Shipping (includes IVA)

Though it's been 2500 years since Sun Tzu wrote "The Art of War", many of his lessons remain relevant. His teaching contains several passages that seem especially suitable for people who work in Information Security:

* "Those who disable foreign armies without combat are the best teachers of the Art of War."

* "Before you fight, first learn the skills of the enemy's workers, and then fight them according to their weaknesses."

* "When you can perceive subtlety, winning is easy."

Without a doubt, this information is key in preparing for attempted security breaches. Without it, determining what to attack and how to do it is impossible. Search engines have become important tools for collecting data and other intelligence. However, despite Google hacking's many years of use, its techniques have perhaps not always been well-treated or publically shared.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu - bit sad

2 books by Greg Egan: Distress & Teranesia

The Invention of Nature : Alexander Von Humboldt's New World

DMT: The spirit molecule

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez (WOW)

The book of dead philosophers by Simon Critchley (funny!)

& some more (I have to start noting it down :P)

Currently: The Systems View of the World by Ervin Laszlo

While you are may be reading this book out of curiosity, we hope it interests
you in learning more about using Sun Tzu’s system to make better decision.

Also uses difficult-to-follow formatting. Concludes with an infomercial-esque sales pitch for additional products:

At this point, you have to make a decision. This is appropriate because Sun Tzu teaches the science of making better decisions. At this point, are you satisfied just being able to say you read The Art of War? Or do you want to develop real skills you will use every day?

"Sunzi Speaks: The Art of War"

Tsai Chih Chung

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385472587

Some online reading that you might find interesting:

http://www.ingber.com/combat97_cmi.ps.gz

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Symposia/joint2008/papers/Hoffman%20...

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Symposia/joint2008/papers/Warden%20P...

http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Smith_Complexity.pdf

If I remember correctly, the translation is "even a rat will fight if cornered", though today we might mutter something about "asymmetric warfare" in response to "full spectrum dominance".

Sun Zi wrote in about 500BC. So it's not like you were warned yesterday. You've had 2500 years of warning.

Expect kamikaze attacks. They happen. Especially from people who feel they have nothing to lose, and feel under attack from very, very strong opponents.

I'd also recommend a comprehensive book about networking infrastructure if you haven't read on already. I don't think a specific one is necessary in this case.

I think the content in The Art of War is good to know in software too especially with how widespread espionage has become in those areas.

It might be a bit of a cliche but it really is profound and is actually more useful than I first thought. Especially "show strength at your weakest, show weakness at your strongest" is something that I've used during negotations and presentations. It sounds like common sense when you read it, because you've seen a lot of this stuff work out ahead of reading it, but it's only once you read it that it becomes abstract and defined enough for me to apply it.

But note I was talking about those worthless derivatives "The Art of War for Business", "The Art of War for Entrepreneurs", etc. Those rely on Sun Tzu's work being generic enough it can be applied to whatever, so it's hilarious to find out it maybe wasn't... exposing those derivative books as the trash they truly are.

Never really been one to enjoy popular books on philosophy (Alchemist was overrated, Monk who sold his Ferrari cliched, The Secret just boring ...IMO) and picked this up at a used book store. The book truly put a new perspective on life for me.

Perhaps it was a combination of the time when I read the book: Undue stress, massive imposter syndrome, that feeling of not moving ahead in life, and the oh-so-messed-up quarter life crisis, but this book was an absolute eyeopener for me.

Find your own meaning in life, and live your own philosophy instead of aping a "master" (spiritual or otherwise) because a "master" is someone who has shaped his own philosophy and that will almost NEVER completely apply to you. In the book, when the titular Siddhartha realises this and starts off on his own journey, something clicked within me and I started making genuine attempts to get past my (mostly) self-imposed problems in life. Can easily say this book helped me get through confusing times and come out better on the other side

Truly a life-changing book for me, and no wonder it's been popular for over half a century!

----

The Art of War, The War of Art (except the final bits of the book) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance come in a close second, each having shaped the way I look at decision making processes and influenced my general life strategy

Audio Books:

Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by
Charles Darwin -- https://librivox.org/the-origin-of-species-by-charles-darwin...

The Art of War by Sun Tzu -- https://archive.org/details/art_of_war_librivox

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift --
https://archive.org/details/gulliver_ld_librivox

Podcasts:

Ruby Rouges (ruby programming talks/programming in general)-- http://rubyrogues.com/

StarTalk with Neil Degrasse Tyson (Space, comedians, science) -- http://www.startalkradio.net/

2. Deathmarch: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects- also a classic.

3. Thinking fast and slow - a great introduction to biases that will affect your thinking in any project.

4. The Art of War - strategy and tactics for attacking any problem. My personal favorite translation is by Thomas Cleary.

2.) Candide by Voltaire - contributed to my personal sense of humor and belief that we live in neither the best nor worst of all possible worlds, but simply the most absurd of them.

3) The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Helped me understand the power of small effeciencies in large systems and the importance of metagaming.

I also look at The Book of 5 Rings and The Art of War on a regular basis.

It is interesting to note that monasticism is neither prescribed nor enjoined in the Bible, in both the Old and the New Testaments [1]. It is, however, mentioned in the Quran that monasticism is rather an invention by the People of the Books namely Christians and Jews [2]. According to the Quran, it's invented for the monks to seek God's good pleasure, but apparently most of the monks do not observe it as it ought to have been observed. Perhaps this book and manual from St. Benedict provided us with the most authentic and comprehensive descriptions of the rules of the monks' observations during the classical antiquity. By reading the rules I can appreciate why the monks have failed observe them ;-). Adding to the fact that it predates the Quran, these type of observations that were probably being referred to by the Quran.

Fun fact, there is an Ashtiname (Book of Peace), a letter sent by Muhammad to the Saint Catherine's Monastery [3]. The purpose is to guarantee the safety of its monks living there against any potential aggression by the Muslim individuals or army. Given the monastery is still exist and standing today despite of being there for more than a thousand years under Islamic government rule is probably the testament of the effectiveness of the covenant provided by the Ashtiname.

[1]https://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/monasticism...

[2]https://www.islamicstudies.info/tafheem.php?sura=57&verse=26...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtiname_of_Muhammad

It actually is "The art of war for lovers" by Connell Cowan

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/317214.The_ART_OF_WAR_FO...

http://www.amazon.com/The-ART-WAR-FOR-LOVERS/dp/0671000632

This having been said, there's no substitute for luck. Even Sun-Tzu ( author of "The Art of War"), when discussing whether skill or luck was best, said that he would prefer luck. Problem is, you can't count on luck.

I keep a very close eye on my competitors. I follow their rss feeds, coverage on blogs, and features that make them better than us. I am surprised this is even up for a debate.

Force is tilting the balance of power to your side by gathering advantages. Warfare is the Way of deception. Therefore, if able, appear unable; if active, appear inactive; if near, appear far; if far, appear near.

If your enemies have advantage, bait them; if they are confused, capture them; if they are numerous, prepare for them; if they are strong, avoid them; if they are angry, disturb them; if they are humble, make them haughty; if they are relaxed, toil them; if they are united, separate them. Attack where your enemies are not prepared; go to where they do not expect.

This strategy leads to victory in warfare, so do not let the enemy see it. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Relatively speaking, I'd say 'our enemies' are extremely strong. Probably best avoided (for the moment) if the overall objective is victory.

I'm not deeply-read on the topic, but here are a few others I've liked …

· Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards. This one in particular analyzes heavily blitzkrieg tactics, and how disorientation and morale are some of the most effective "weapons." Has many good cross-references.

· The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Military strategy and conflict philosophy. Basically, the philosophy that undergirds the blitzkrieg: lots on gaining advantage, using morale, turning "deficiencies" in to advantages, etc.

· Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. It's rah-rah and a bit repetitive, but has some good bits on team dynamics, element of surprise—if nothing else, an interesting glimpse in to the dynamics of high-functioning military units.

So far, Grunt has touched on military uniform fashion design and its role in psyche … we'll see where else it goes, but an enjoyable read thus far.

He burns his boats and breaks his cooking-pots; like a shepherd driving a flock of sheep, he drives his men this way and that, and nothing knows whither he is going.

To muster his host and bring it into danger:—this may be termed the business of the general.

-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Book 11. The Nine Situations
https://suntzusaid.com/book/11

~ The Art of War. Sun Tzu (5th century BCE)

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

Chuang-tzu, 4th century BC

The Art of War by Sun Tzu, 5th century BC

Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, 14th century AD

Translations can be extremely different, most of them are pretty vague, and many are just plain wrong. The above one is known between scholars to be one of the best translations out there, if not the best. He also gives a very nice 46-pages-long introduction to the context of where the book was written, and about who Sun Tzu was. Other than that, there at the end of each chapter there are some good comments from him, explaining certain aspects of it, which is good for the first reading.

I would stay away from the free ebooks/versions, I haven't yet found one with a good enough translation, and that causes issues like for example, the sixth chapter (one of the most important ones, in my opinion), which usually has a completely different interpretation in the free ones I've read, because of the bad translation.

Is a must for ANYONE that is involved with the leadership of men.

- The Holy Bible
- Moby Dick by Melville
- The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
- The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas
- The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
- The Qur'an
- The Prince by Machiavelli
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
- The Confessions by Saint Augustine
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
- The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric
- Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andric
- Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque
- The Divine Comedy by Dante

--- This list totals out at 311.14EUR and has 23 books.
[0] - https://www.bookdepository.com/
[1] - https://www.betterworldbooks.com/

* * * * *

I think the spirit of what is being said in 'The Art of War', is the same principle that's being discussed in the article: Don't rush into striking before you are sure of victory, and lose everything; instead use the advantage to build yourself into an invincible position, with less risk.

* * * * *

'The Art of War' has been around a long time.

If there's a lesson here, its that strategy gamers might benefit from doing some reading.

I liked the article, and thought it was good; but it comes across that the author has no education in either (economic) game theory, or the study of game playing AI (e.g. minimax, search based AI techniques like you'd see in a chess AI etc). (Two related, but sometimes separate fields).

Which is fine - but there's a lot of good work in those fields, that strategy gamers, that seek to understand games analytically, as well as intuitively, would do well to read.

Most of my work is boring old enterprise apps in java, c# or c++; the GW-Basic manual is a relic from my first computer that I keep around for sentimental reasons. Numerical Recipes is referred to on occasion, as is the SQL pocket guide, the other two are good for taking a 5 minute break from things.

If you've lumped "The Art of War" into the same category in your mind as Ayn Rand's writings, I suggest you to read it. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised. Aside from being both commonly cited as influential (in greater or lesser unfortunate ways), there's really about zero similarity between the two.

The U.S. Constitution was the culmination of centuries of thinking about political power and is remarkable for its distrust of absolute power. Unfortunately, that distrust has been slowly eroded over the last nearly two-and-a-half centuries, beginning with Marbury v. Madison and currently at such a state that presidents enter into war without an act of Congress, judges make law from the bench, and Congress dictates to the executive which cabinet positions must be filled.

It was a great experiment, but actually already a failed one in the sense of the original debate back in the 1770s and '80s.

To the OP - in my experience, it's absolutely enough for a dev to be good to move up. That's the beauty of software development. Now, if you ever want to be a manager or a lead, it's definitely a different story.

2. "The art of war" by Sun Tzu

3. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

As an evolutionary selective pressure, war and military necessity are unparalleled.

Re-reading Samuel B. Griffith's translation of The Art of War, I noticed that he mentions, in 1963, Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, which had only begun delivering volumes (the work remains in progress). That would include not only metalurgy, but entire volumes devoted to both martial and marine technologies.

Fiction sums it up best:

"Public’s out there throwing darts at a board, sport. I don’t throw darts at a board, I bet on sure things. Read Sun Tsu's The Art of War ‘every battle is won before it's fought.’ Think about it. You are not as smart as I thought you were, buddy boy. You wonder why fund managers can’t beat the S&P 500, cause they’re sheep and sheep get slaughtered. I’ve been in the business since ’69 most of these Harvard MBA types don’t add up to dog shit. Give me guys that are poor, smart, and hungry and no feelings. You win a few you lose a few but you keep on fighting. If you need a friend, get a dog. It’s trench warfare out there, pal." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/

You can apply The Art of War to anything that involves competition. I don't know about anyone else but for me I think a lot of the success I've had in applying what's in the book to my life can't be totally attributed to just applying the advice in and of itself. For me, part of my success in its application most likely came from feeling more confident and like you knew some sort of secret ancient wisdom that someone else didn't know. Reading through it and thinking of applying it to your own situation really will have that confidence boosting effect I think.

“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

    According to an old story, a lord of ancient China once asked 
    his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them 
    was the most skilled in the art.

    The physician, whose reputation was such that his name became 
    synonymous with medical science in China, replied, 

    "My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it 
    before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house.

    "My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, 
    so his name does not get out of the neighborhood.

    "As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, 
    so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords."

    - Translator's Introduction, Taoism and The Art of War
      The Art of War, Sun Tzu, Thomas Cleary

2-Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers. This book makes "Crossing the chasm" a simplistic introduction for laggards

3-The Art of War by Sun Tzu

4-If Nature Is the Answer, What Was the Question? By Jorge Wagensberg

5-Sacred hoops by Phil Jackson

6-Fear from freedom by Erich Fromm

7-Michelangelo biography of a genious

8-Blindness by Jose Saramago

9-On writing by Stephen King

I will recommend to read just few books for a start
1. Dao - Lao Tzu
2.The Willpower Instinct - Kelly McGonigal
3. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

you are not going to reach self-knowing or self-control using other people's thoughts. Everything good comes from the walked path, It takes time and practice.

And the way is not only to evolve from inside but from outside too, so "workout" daily is also important part.

> There are business books applying its lessons to office politics and corporate strategy. Many Japanese companies make the book required reading for their key executives. The book is also popular among Western business management, who have turned to it for inspiration and advice on how to succeed in competitive business situations. It has also been applied to the field of education.

Here's where I start talking out of my ass: If you think about it, aren't generals the original managers? They had to coordinate the actions of thousands of people. Sometimes hundreds of thousands. They have to delegate to their subordinates because it'd be impossible to micromanage everything. Also, I think it's more than a coincidence that the quote seemed to fit so well. Outsourcing is hiring mercenaries.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Five-Rings-Miyamoto-Musashi/dp/15...
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Liddell-Hart/dp/0195014766...
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War#Application_outs...

Eh, that depends on your ability to generalize some of its lessons to the world you live in, which I'm sure it beyond a lot of people at the usual stages in their lives when they're starting up companies, especially giving the distractions of that process. But as the author emphasizes in his his very first point, your core team of people is the single most critical thing, and paraphrasing Paul Graham in one of his essays (which the author generally and perhaps specifically recommends), if you use average "stuff", you're likely to get an average result, and the average result for a startup is FAILURE!

Plenty of interpersonal things can be directly illuminated by The Art of War, lots of that involves threats subtle or more direct, the lesson about "death ground" is vital, etc. But you might as well add the roughly equally short The Prince by Machiavelli and no doubt other books, at least these two are short (and make sure you get a good translation of The Art of War, I wouldn't trust any that weren't done by a military officer, and therefore I recommend Samuel B. Griffiths' version: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195014766/).

More generally, how to you gain the wisdom to comprehend and put into place the lessons the author is teaching, especially if you're a callow youth? Reading (and rereading) "the classics" has long been a method for that, and one that works for me.

Emphasis on the re-reading, never stop learning, e.g. I'm on perhaps my 3rd pass of Churchill's The Gathering Storm, about the post-WWI period, it ends with him being appointed Prime Minister as the Nazi blitzkrieg falls upon the Low countries and France. First pass was in the '80s, 2nd I can't remember, and now I'm re-reading it about to turn 56 and learning even more from it, having, for example, learned a lot more about history, government and war all though the years.

If you like the Art of War at all, you simply must read von Clauswitz's On War:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_War#Synopsis

At least read the first 20 pages. An incredibly clear, insightful thinker. He was an utter perfectionist, he worked on the book for decades and died with it incomplete, but the beginning in particular is precisely accurate and insightful like almost nothing else I've read.

  > The 'occupy' post did satisfy me intellectually - I don't have a position on the
  > politics either way, but the explanation of 'battle tactics', how they developed 
  > by non-military people and how they can be used 'on the street' was 
  > intellectually interesting.

It's almost oddly metaphysical, and relevant in zero-sum games.

Also:

"evidence of how you have come to understand the barriers faced by others, evidence of your academic service to advance equitable access to higher education for women, racial minorities, and individuals from other groups that have been historically underrepresented in higher education, evidence of your research focusing on underserved populations or related issues of inequality, or evidence of your leadership among such groups.”

It's funny how some forms of censorship are evil, but other forms are lauded.

They are essentially demanding that research 'be in service to' a specific intersectional perspective, which has to be the opposite of academic freedom.

Art of the start - Guy Kawasaki

The art of war - Sun Tzu

What if he was literally telling you how to put an arrow through the eye of the enemy general? How do you write a self-help book "based on The Art of War" out of that? (You can still derive general meaning that wasn't put there by Sun Tzu, but it's a lot harder!)

> The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism—the Human Colossus—rose into existence.

I like thinking about us this way too, as being both individuals but at the same time also forming a sorts of organism together.

What originally got me thinking about us this way was something that Sun Tzu wrote in his book The Art of War.

I think this might be the part of that book that made me think of it like this:

> The skillful tactician may be likened to the shuai-jan. Now the shuai-jan is a snake that is found in the ChUng mountains. Strike at its head, and you will be attacked by its tail; strike at its tail, and you will be attacked by its head; strike at its middle, and you will be attacked by head and tail both.

> Asked if an army can be made to imitate the shuai-jan, I should answer, Yes. For the men of Wu and the men of Yueh are enemies; yet if they are crossing a river in the same boat and are caught by a storm, they will come to each other's assistance just as the left hand helps the right.

http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

Taken together, these books cover just about everything there is to know about the sciences, about human history, human nature and how to understand and communicate effectively with other people. Only one other book besides these needs to be studied/read: The Bible.

That statement itself seems intellectually dishonest. What has changed that invalidates his arguments? After all, C++17 is still backwards compatible to the C++ of 1993.

Pardon me for finding this humorous, but stating that I can’t use a Donald Knuth quote in a computer science topic because it’s an old is like saying I can’t quote Sun Tzu when talking about modern events because the Art of War is an old book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programm...

By contrast, Sun Zi's The Art of War, being more a manual of practical statesmanship and less an ethical or philosophical sounding board, states that one should only go to war when in a position of strength and certain victory. Further, actual warfare is a last option: "the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field."

A) There is no need for 'source'? Asking for 'source' does not count as an argument. Where is your 'source' for 'we got by for thousands of years?' for example?

B) We didn't 'get by for thousands of years' without surveillance. Spying has been part of statecraft for 5000 years. The very first textbook on any subject, written more than 2000 years ago - 'The Art of War' has a chapter dedicated to it.

C) If you were ever exposed to what is actually going on in this and other countries, you'd immediately change your tune. It happens often. Here in Canada, we had a fuzzy new Prime Ministerial candidate who wanted to kill a new surveillance bill. Until he became PM and got his 'daily security briefings' as to the reality of the world. And 'poof' - his promise to overthrow the bill disappeared immediately as his naivte withered against the facts.

I do not believe in a 'surveillance state' (i.e. arbitrary surveillance) and I generally believe that citizens should have the right to privacy as per other criminal issues. But I also believe that if you are building a bomb in your basement, and the Feds want to know why, they can get a court order and 'surveil' you.

As for things to read: I'm generally interested in, well, a lot of things, but crypto, security, organizational and national aspects of both, and the like. Schneier's Cryptography and his more recent works (most of which focus increasingly on human factors), comp.risks, The Art of War, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, random linkage through Wikipedia (highly underrated). Actually, for that last, I should probably write intentional linkage. Find some topic you're interested in, search for a few base articles, and follow the links out to other related aspects. Particularly case studies / people, and the like.

If you're going to study WWII, I have to recommend Daniel Yergin's The Prize (either the book or the video series, I've viewed the latter and confess only skimmed through bits of the former, it's voluminous). The relationship of oil to the events of the 20th century simply cannot be overstated.

Sun Tzu warns thus: "Soldiers when in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm. If they are in hostile country, they will show a stubborn front. If there is no help for it, they will fight hard."

    If there's a lesson here, its that strategy 
    gamers might benefit from doing some reading.

In short, I think there are very few if any sc2 players that would benefit (in terms of improving their game at least) from reading The Art of War.

Fundamentally, we ignored even the simplest tenets of 'The Art of War'. It's actually painful to read this after the fact. Powell knew this stuff and at it's core, the Pottery Barn principle is a couple of those AoW tenets boiled down into something everyone can understand.

In the end, if you can't even follow the sage advice that has been proved countless times over the last couple thousands of years, you've got bigger problems.

Literary Chinese has quite intricate grammar, about which both Chinese and Western linguists debate in book-length works. Just as with any other language, a word-by-word approach to translation will not do. When I first saw this article submitted to Hacker News, I read it for a while, looking for clues that the blog post author actually knows Chinese. To me, too, the site looked a bit like a scam, trying to sell management advice based on an ancient holy text for rather too much money.

For me, the key take-away from translations of Sun Tzu's Art of War that I have read is to leave an enemy a way to flee. Don't force people to fight to the death by surrounding them entirely. That advice was followed when P.R.C. soldiers moved in on the peaceful Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989. One corner of the square was left open as an escape route so that people could simply run away.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/2INJSM38...

1. On War (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Carl Von Clausewitz

2. Leadership: The Warrior's Art by Barry R. McCaffrey

3. Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach by Dandridge M. Malone

4. The Defense of Hill 781: An Allegory of Modern Mechanized Combat by James R. McDonough

5. The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver-Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle by Robert Leonhard

6. Strategy: Second Revised Edition (Meridian) by B. H. Liddell Hart

7. The Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli

8. Hagakure: The Book of the Samauri by Tsunetomo Yamamoto

9. The Emperor's Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

10. The Art of War (Shambhala classics) by Sun Tzu

11. The Prince (Bantam Classics) by Niccolo Machiavelli

12. Evolutionary Game Theory by Jörgen W. Weibull

13. On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Tse-tung

14. The History of the Peloponnesian War: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics) by Thucydides

15. The Histories (Penguin Classics) by Herodotus

16. The Persian Expedition (Penguin Classics) by Xenophon

17. Plutarch: Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans (Modern Library Series, Vol. 1) by Plutarch

18. Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2 (Modern Library Classics) by Plutarch

19. Livy: The Early History of Rome, Books I-V (Penguin Classics) (Bks. 1-5) by Titus Livy

20. The History of Rome from Its Foundation, Books XXI-XXX: The War with Hannibal (Penguin Classics) (Bks. 21-30) by Titus Livius Livy