Bookshelf

A very detailed and far-reaching book by Robert Sapolsky. He starts with a single action and discusses what caused it. Starting at neuron impulses moving backwards to hormones and even further to evolution. It's slow, technical but it covers so much. I probably understood 40% of the book on my first reading and I felt like I gained a ton. I found some parts specifically the societal ones to be a bit less interesting. But the book ends on a very powerful note.

Some portions of the book are definitely interesting. I was a fan of some of the exercises. The amount of group exercises the book calls for makes it seem a bit classroom oriented. I didn't hate the book but I thought it fell a bit short on bringing new things to the table. I felt like there was basically only one chapter that actually directly dealt with techniques to defeat conceptual blocks.

Overall, the book is fine and interesting. It is the story of Richard Thaler and his role in developing behavioral economics as a field of study. Unfortunately, the content has a lot of overlap with Thinking: Fast and Slow. Some of the other interesting stuff is passed over because it is in his other book Nudge. I did not glean much from this book, but some one that hasn't read Thinking: Fast and Slow would get a lot.

Prior to reading this book I had used a ton of JavaScript for software development but I had never learned it per se. It was similar enough to ruby or python and I had seen a ton so I had no issues writing JavaScript. But I never really understood the internals of the language. This book does a phenomenal job explaining those internals. It seems to be very up-to-date. I am a big fan of the tasks associated with many of the chapters. I would highly recommend this as an introduction to Javascript.

The contents of the book should be pretty obvious from the title. That said, I really enjoyed it. It was super easy to follow. I had enough leeway throughout the book that I really felt that I understood the topic. I had a ton of fun reading this and following along.

The book was an interesting read with a decent amount of new information that I took away from it. However, given that it was a fairly technical non-fiction book, I really wish it had more sources for the information. I would have really enjoyed if there was more information about actual studies that got ran on design choices. That said, there's a surprisingly large amount in common between the process of design and software development.

Maybe it's because I read this book so soon after reading the first one, but I found the unicorn project very lacking compared to the Phoenix project. Because they share a timeline much of the plot is already known if you've read the first book. Well, the first book was a struggle of man versus technical debt, man versus poor practices. Practices this one had a lot of the same themes but also significantly more man versus man. I just didn't find those parts. Interesting. I also found the preachy bits much more common and bothersome in this book.

This was a super enjoyable book. It did a great job, essentially turning a DevOps playbook into a engaging and cohesive story. It was very fun to think about the problems being encountered and contemplate my own solutions. Then read about the book solutions. Unfortunately the book does get almost preachy at times, which makes sense because it is supposed to convey best practices. Although it kind of misses the mark as both a fiction and non-fiction book, it is still very enjoyable.

Definitely one of the more interesting books I've read on how people's behavior is influenced. It is a great mix of individual case studies, scientific literature and general anecdotes. Chaldini does a phenomenal job making the topics understandable.

Despite the book being almost 20 years old, the majority of the concepts that McConnell suggests still very much hold true even now. The main theme of the book seems to be the elimination of mental complexity in the code that we write. McConnell shows how to achieve this in all areas of software construction.

This book is the book to read if you are interested in the concept of prospect theory and the concepts of a system one and system two. The book is all about analyzing how people think about things subconsciously. Overall, I found a book to be very interesting and in many ways enlightening.

The book wasn't bad. I enjoyed the exercises that each chapter had me doing. Despite going through the book, I somehow didn't feel like I learned that much. I'm not sure if it is my fault or the books, but some of the conceptual building blocks that it used were a bit murky to me. Which created shaky foundations for the rest of what the book was building.

This book was full of fascinating histories of varying countries and objects. I think conceptually attempting to group it around a English house might have been a bit convoluted. Bryson also at times has a tendency to want to simply list out numbers. Overall, it is an entertaining read.

I found this book to be incredibly enlightening. Everything comes back to trauma. This book really made me rethink my own actions and the behavior of others. It does slow down a bit at the end.