Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Engineering & Transportation (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

Carbon: One Atom's Odyssey

John Barnett and Roald Hoffman

5 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

Stephen E. Ambrose

4.6 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

Serhii Plokhy, Ralph Lister, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

5 HN comments

507 Mechanical Movements

Henry T. Brown

4.5 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

Jeremy Narby

4.7 on Amazon

4 HN comments

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

Scott Galloway, Jonathan Todd Ross, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Stone

William Hall

4.8 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It

John Yudkin and Robert H. Lustig

4.7 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Jungle: A Photicular Book

Dan Kainen and Kathy Wollard

4.9 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Signals and Systems

Alan Oppenheim, Alan Willsky, et al.

4.1 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Radiant: Farm Animals Up Close and Personal (Farm Animal Photography Book)

Traer Scott

4.8 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Island of the Lost: An Extraordinary Story of Survival at the Edge of the World

Joan Druett

4.5 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Michio Kaku

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics

John Rumble

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World

Josh Tickell and Terry Tamminen

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

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xenophonfonJune 17, 2016

Zumdahl's Chemistry and the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics were the mainstays of my high school and college chemistry education.

nerdtalkeronMay 3, 2014

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned it yet, but the book that would be most practical to actually recover society after disaster from a purely technical standpoint would be the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Chemistry-Physics-94th-Editio...

The sheer amount of information in that huge book is crazy.

Another alternative would be a wikipedia backup stored on an SD card and one of these or similar: http://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-Wikipedia/...

nonbelonJune 7, 2019

One thing that bugs me is they measure CO2 levels in ppm instead of moles/m^3 (or whatever would be appropriate). Why is the denominator assumed constant? Why can't nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapor, etc be changing too?

In fact people have been extracting N2 from the atmosphere at scale for ~120 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

And apparently O2 has been depleting as well: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/

We are at the point where gradeschoolers are questioning why the tables of atmospheric constituents don't add up to 100%:

>Two recent reliable sources cited here have total atmospheric compositions, including trace molecules, that exceed 100%. They are Allen's Astrophysical Quantities[5] (2000, 100.001241343%) and CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics[4] (2016–2017, 100.004667%), which cites Allen's Astrophysical Quantities. Both are used as references in this article. Both exceed 100% because their CO2 values were increased to 345 ppmv, without changing their other constituents to compensate. This is made worse by the April 2019 CO
2 value, which is 413.32 ppmv.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#cite_note-...

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