Hacker News Books

My in-laws recently downsized to a townhouse and needed to get rid of some books, so I ended up with about 20 Jack Reacher (and similar) books. I grab one whenever we head out on vacation.

They're great, because there's no need to read them in order, or remember previous plots. They're good enough to keep my attention but not so great I can't put them down when it's time to do something else.

I don't know how they thread that needle so well, but they do. I expect when AI write the first decent book, this is what it will look like.

Programming books are rarely page turners. I cannot think of one book to add to the (currently empty) list here. I find most programming books to be boring and discursive. Far too many fall into a pattern not too far removed from romance novels where, inevitably, the alpha male hero beds the heroine by chapter three. And if software engineering is considered programming, many of those books seem to be anchored in the occult where certain spells produce magical results for arcane reasons.

Personally I dislike tutorials and the pedagogy that comes along with that style. Even when well done they seem wordy presentation of the trivial and obvious.

Serious computer science books (e.g., Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Hank Warren's Hackers Delight) take careful reading and study; I read them for pleasure, but it is a different pleasure that I get from, say, a Lee Child's Jack Reacher novel.

I think there are good reasons for this situation. The interesting aspects of programming are complex, involve a deep understanding of multiple levels of abstraction, and require considerable background knowledge. This is incompatible with a mindless read.

I'm a literary minded person and completely understand the draw of genre fiction; I'm currently burning my way through Jack Reacher 16-book set.

But I think it is a very different thing intellectually to literary works, and it shouldn't be dismissed as snobbish (I'm not referring to you or anyone else here) simply to point that out.