Collection 01 · 9 books
The programming shelf: languages, craft, and the ideas underneath them.
2011
Marijn Haverbeke
A ground-up tour of JavaScript that treats programming as a way of thinking, not a list of syntax. It moves from values and functions through data structures and asynchronous code to building real projects. The later editions add modern language features and exercises you can run in the browser.
1978
Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie
The definitive introduction to C, written by the language's creator and his colleague at Bell Labs. Its tight prose and small worked examples became the model for programming books. It still teaches how memory, pointers, and the machine really behave.
1985
Harold Abelson & Gerald Jay Sussman
MIT's legendary introductory text, taught in Scheme, that uses abstraction as the organizing idea of all programming. It builds interpreters, simulators, and a register machine from first principles. Readers come away thinking about programs as things that describe processes.
1979
Douglas Hofstadter
A playful, sprawling book that weaves together logic, music, and art to explain how self-reference can give rise to meaning. Dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise introduce each idea before the essays dig in. It won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize and remains a touchstone for thinking about minds and machines.
2002
Henry S. Warren Jr.
A collection of low-level tricks for arithmetic, bit manipulation, and clever machine-level shortcuts. Each trick comes with its derivation, so it doubles as a lesson in how computers represent numbers. It is a favorite of compiler writers and anyone who enjoys squeezing out a few instructions.
2009
Peter Seibel
Seibel interviews fifteen accomplished programmers, including Jamie Zawinski, Donald Knuth, and Ken Thompson. He asks each how they learned, debug, read code, and decide what makes a good programmer. The result is an oral history of the craft rather than a technical manual.
2019
Jonathan E. Steinhart
A guided look beneath the hood, from binary numbers and logic gates to compilers, networks, and operating systems. It is aimed at people who write software but were never taught how the hardware actually works. Each chapter ties everyday devices back to the fundamentals.
2020
Matt Neuburg
A comprehensive O'Reilly guide to building iPhone and iPad apps in Swift with UIKit. It covers views, controllers, animation, networking, and the app lifecycle in depth. It is the reference to reach for when an iOS API behaves in a way you did not expect.
1999
Simon Singh
A history of secret writing, from Mary Queen of Scots' doomed cipher to the Enigma machine and modern public-key cryptography. Singh explains each breakthrough through the people who made and broke the codes. It ends with quantum cryptography and the ongoing contest between privacy and surveillance.
Collection 02 · 4 books
How machines learn, and what happens when they get very good at it.
2017
François Chollet
Written by the creator of Keras, this book teaches deep learning through hands-on code rather than heavy math. It covers computer vision, text, and generative models with clear intuitions for why each technique works. It is one of the most readable on-ramps to neural networks.
2017
Aurélien Géron
A practical, project-driven guide that starts with classic machine learning and works up to deep neural networks. Every chapter pairs concepts with runnable code and exercises on real datasets. It is widely used as both a course text and a working reference.
2015
Pedro Domingos
Domingos surveys the five main schools of machine learning: symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians, and analogizers. He argues that a single unifying learning algorithm may exist and would change every field it touches. It is written for general readers who want the big picture without the math.
2014
Nick Bostrom
Bostrom examines the ways a machine intelligence could surpass humans and the paths by which that might happen. He focuses on the control problem: how to make sure such a system's goals stay aligned with ours. It helped bring AI safety into mainstream conversation.
Collection 03 · 8 books
Biographies and histories of the people and companies that built the modern world.
2014
Walter Isaacson
A history of the digital revolution told through the collaborations of Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, the ENIAC team, and the founders of the internet and Silicon Valley. Isaacson argues that innovation comes from teams more than lone geniuses. It runs from the first computers to the modern web.
2007
Walter Isaacson
A biography that follows Einstein from a rebellious student to the physicist who reshaped our understanding of space and time. Isaacson draws on newly opened letters to show his personal life alongside the science. It explains why his curiosity and nonconformity mattered as much as his math.
2003
Walter Isaacson
A portrait of Franklin as printer, scientist, inventor, diplomat, and founding father. The book follows his rise from a Boston apprenticeship to helping shape a new nation. Isaacson pays particular attention to his pragmatism and his habit of constant self-improvement.
2015
Ashlee Vance
The first major biography of Musk, based on extensive interviews with him, his family, and his colleagues. It traces his path from South Africa through PayPal to Tesla and SpaceX. Vance shows both the ambition and the toll it takes on the people around him.
2020
Steven Levy
Levy had unusual access to Mark Zuckerberg and other executives for this account of how Facebook grew from a dorm-room project into a global platform. It covers the product decisions, the privacy failures, and the political fallout. The book is a detailed look at how a company can scale faster than its judgment.
2014
Ed Catmull
Pixar's co-founder describes how the studio built a culture that protects creative work from fear and bureaucracy. He shares specific practices, such as the Braintrust, that helped the company recover from failures. The lessons apply well beyond animation.
1994
Kevin Kelly
Kelly explores how biology, machines, and economies increasingly share the same logic of decentralized, self-organizing systems. He draws on swarms, ecosystems, and early networks to argue that bottom-up control beats top-down design. It was an early and influential map of ideas that later shaped internet culture.
1973
Jacob Bronowski
Based on the BBC television series, it traces human progress through science, art, and invention, from early tools to modern physics. Bronowski writes with a humanist's eye, linking discoveries to the people who made them. It argues that knowledge is a shared human achievement.
Collection 04 · 5 books
How software organizations actually ship, and how to build a working life.
2013
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford
A novel about an IT manager handed a failing, high-stakes software project and given a short time to rescue it. Through the story it introduces the principles of DevOps: flow, feedback, and continual learning. It is often given to new managers because it makes operations problems feel human.
2019
Gene Kim
A companion novel to The Phoenix Project, told from the point of view of a senior developer sent into exile after a corporate disaster. It follows her as she rebuilds trust and technical practice across a struggling company. The story lays out five ideals for productive engineering work.
2018
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim
The authors present multi-year research showing which practices separate high-performing software teams from the rest. They identify measurable capabilities, such as deployment frequency and lead time, that predict both delivery and business outcomes. It gives managers evidence rather than opinion.
2007
Timothy Ferriss
Ferriss argues that people can escape the standard career by automating income, cutting low-value work, and designing life around freedom rather than retirement. He offers tactics for outsourcing, negotiating remote work, and building small businesses. It became a defining book for the lifestyle-design movement.
1981
R. Buckminster Fuller
Fuller lays out his view of humanity's history and its future, arguing that resources are sufficient if used with design intelligence. He connects shipping, energy, and technology to the long arc of social change. It is dense and idiosyncratic, and a good look at his systems thinking.
Collection 05 · 3 books
Old questions and a few phrases for the road.
1997
Plato, edited by John M. Cooper
The full surviving corpus of Plato's dialogues and letters in a single volume, from the Republic and the Symposium to the Apology. Socrates and his interlocutors take on justice, love, knowledge, and the good life through argument. The Hackett edition gathers the standard English translations under one cover.
c. 700 BCE
Homer
The epic of Odysseus's ten-year journey home from the Trojan War, facing monsters, temptations, and the gods' anger. Back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus hold off suitors who have overrun the household. It is one of the oldest and most influential stories in Western literature.
Year TBC
Lonely Planet
A pocket phrasebook with essential Mandarin for travelers, including greetings, directions, food, and emergencies. Phrases are given in characters and pinyin, with pronunciation guides. Check the copyright page on the shelf copy for the edition year.
NatureHouse Concierge
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