La crème de la crème
Academics and learning
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann
Foundations of data engineering.
- Head First Design Patterns - Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson
Entertaining book. Try the O’reilly “Head First” series with this one. Also, try to get the first edition, the new one looks bad.
- Effective Java - Joshua Bloch
Idiomatic, high-quality Java. Makes you think deeply about the language.
- Streaming Systems - Tyler Akdiau, Slava Chernyak, Reuven Lax
Foundations of distributed computing for streaming. Starting with 101 and 102 is enough.
- Code Complete - Steve McConnell
Decades of trenches knowledge distilled. Reading this book instantaneously makes you a better developer.
- Refactoring - Martin Fowler
I didn’t like this book at first. I found it way too verbose and procedural. Important ideas tend to be hidden by useless repetitive explanations. Still, I cant’ deny it had a major impact on how I approach changes in big codebases.
- Concurrency in practice - Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea
Threads are tricky. Used as a reference.
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, - Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig
Foundations of AI. Nice to use as a reference.
- Deep Learning with Python - François Chollet
A hands-on practical book to build Deep Learning models. Excellent ROTI.
- Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments - Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang, Ya Xu
Years of hard-earned knowledge in a simple, actionable book. Great for both left-to-right read and reference.
Fictions
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley A totalitarian regime with Western methods.
- 1984 - George Orwell
A totalitarian regime with Eastern methods.
- The Robot series - Isaac Asimov The beginning of the Robot series is actually about debugging automatons. Kinda like post-mortems stories.
Non-fictions
Comics
Franco-Belge
- Asterix in Switzerland - René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo
French “Bédé” at its best.
- Cigarettes : Le dossier sans filtre - Pierre Boisserie, Stéphane Brangier
Exceptionally well-documented graphical document about the tobacco business in all its aspects: historical, economic, marketing, medical, political, environmental. Eye-opening.
- Il faut flinguer Ramirez - Nicolas Petrimaux
Modern French comic. Makes fun of American film productions of a certain epoch, with nice humor and impactful arts.
- Le monde sans fin - Christophe Blain (Illustrator), Jean-Marc Jancovici
Jancovici is a famous figure in France. He works on global warming causes and solutions. This comic is an easy read that gives a cohesive view of the problem.
US Comics
- Watchmen - Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins
The monument. Apart from all other possible praises, I find the coloring amazing.
- Batman: The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley
Inside the troubled mind of the Batman.
Mangas
