Book recommendations

[Westech]

I have an Amazon gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket. Can anyone recommend some good books?

[deronsizemore]

Only book I've bought recently was CSS Mastery by Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, and Simon Collison.

It seems to be a pretty good book. (not finished yet) I've been basically using it lately as a reference more than reading material.

[demosfen]

It would help if you mentioned what your interests are, but this should work for most people :thumbs_up

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3037664479

[Cutter]

Nice, he's a very good photographer ;)

[Westech]

lol, not quite what I had in mind. :D

I'm open to most suggestions, but I guess what I'm most intestested in reading right now would be books on business and investing. (Preferably non-boring ones.)

Cutter, I've picked up a few copies of Business 2.0 because of your recommendation and liked it so much I've subscribed. I'm also probably going to get a copy or Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Any other suggestions along these lines?

[bbolte]

how about something by Ben Stein?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/104-1540183-8536715?store-name=books&field-keywords=ben+stein&x=0&y=0&url=index%3Dstripbooks%3Arelevance-above
i read this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401903207/qid=1151723331/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/104-1540183-8536715?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
not to bad, wish i had the buck to do something like it...

[Cutter]

Here are my general business favorites:
"Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got" by Jay Abraham
"How to Salvage Millions from your Small Business" by Ron Sturgeon

Neither is directly related to internet publishing, but they are good.

Besides Business 2.0 I like to read Harvard Business Review (very expensive, subscription is over $100 a year) and Fortune Small Business.

[Cutter]

Just got two books in the mail I ordered from Amazon months ago. One was a pre-order so it delayed the whole shipment

The preorder is "The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling more of less" I read the guy's blog and I understand the idea. I doubt I will have the interest to read it page to page.

The second is "The singularity is near" by ray kurzweil. Years ago I read "The age of spiritual machines" by him and it was a real eye opener. This book is over 600 page so I don't know when I'll have time to read it, but I am looking forward to it.

[MaxS]

While we're on the topic, what do you guys think about Rich Dad, Poor Dad? I haven't read it but I just might pick it up.

[Chris]

I agree with the message of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but if you're already keen to that message I don't know how much you can really pick up from the book as opposed to just a summary. Plus it might be geared more towards a wage slave person saving for retirement as opposed to a young business owner such as most of the people here.

[bbolte]

i don't know, there was something about it that i didn't like, but i can't put my finger on it.

[Chris]

I just finished "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand... its definitely literature, and not always an easy read (at one point a person goes on a literal 70 page speech, which I mostly skipped, because it was mostly just reiteration of previous concepts), but it was pretty good. Definitely not for anyone with socialist tendencies though. Gordan Gecko would love it.

[Cutter]

Here is another one of my obnoxiously long posts:

I'm 45 pages in to "The Singularity is Near." Damn, this is a really good book. By the way, the author is an an inventor responsible for like like optical character reading, text to speech synthasis, voice recognition, and more. This book also has a quote by Bill Gates on the dust jacket.

In the part I am reading now Ray explains how scientific progress is exponential. People usually underestimate progress in the short term, because we don't realise small roadblocks, but overestimate it in the long term because we don't take in to account how other achievements will make our current job easier.

One example he gives is the human genome. After taking a year to complete something like 1/10,000th of 1% of it, the scientists working on it believed we would need another 100 years, well it happened a lot quicker.

Most people think of progress as linear. If I asked you what 2026 would look like, you would think of the changes that happened between 1986 and 2006, and try to imagine them moving forward another change. However, as exponential growth increases 20 years of change (scientificly) happens in more like 7, and we get 100 years of progress in 20. To try to compare the changes of 1906 to 2006 in order to get an idea of what 2026 will look like is almost unreal.

On the other hand, there are some very real political and economic challenges we will have to face to get to that point which could percievably stop us. However, I'm not giving much weight to a doomsday scenario at this point.

Another thing I was thinking about is exponential growth outside visibility. That is, just because we have the progress do things really look dramatically different?

I am specifically thinking about 3D graphics in computer games. 1992 of so we went from 2D to 3D with Wolfenstein 3D, a pretty significant occomplishment. 1993, Doom came out. It was a big step up from Wolfenstein 3D visually, and perhaps technologically. In 1996 Quake was released, huge leap in graphical power over Doom. 1997 say Quake 2, a pretty significant step up. Quake 3 in 1999, another big step up. Between 1999 and 2006 3D gaming has seen a huge jump in the function and power of 3D games, now run by graphics cards vastly most powerful than used by Hollywood's 3D workstations to do movie effects which cost tens of thousands of dollars or more.

If you step back and compare the visual difference between Doom 3 and Quake 3, it is huge. But I still feel that the difference between Quake 3 and Wolfenstein 3D is dramatic.

In other words, the next "100 years" of progress will be impressive but not as unbelievable as the world of the 1900s to today has been.

The interesting thing is I was also thinking of this in business terms as I read this. Exponential growth looks linear and may be even kind of flat for a while, and then bam it takes off. As an employee you get none of that, because of how you are compensated (unless you are a CEO I suppose.)

While reading this book I am thinking very seriously how the web itself could change in 20 years.

[Chris]

There was an article in Playboy this month that kinda covered the same concepts, I think the author of that book actually wrote part of it.

Basically they said that the degree of innovation of the last 50 years would be accomplished in the next 14.

[paul]

Buy low, sell high, collect early and pay late. Dick Levin. It's probably 20 years old by now, but it was a great introduction to business accounting. For a small business cash flow will kill you quicker than lack of profits. I'm not sure how much good reading advice does though. I didn't really appreciate the wisdom of much of it until I had been there myself :(

[Westech]

Great suggestions! Thanks, everyone.



I just finished "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand...

I've read both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." I enjoyed them both, but don't think I'll ever want to invest the time to read either one again! I've always thought that some Ayn Rand literature would make a great Christmas gift for a mutual friend of ours who used to post here a while back but then abruptly stopped for some reason. ;)

[Chris]

Haha ya... he was just a confused kid though I think.

[moonshield]

I just finished "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand... its definitely literature, and not always an easy read (at one point a person goes on a literal 70 page speech, which I mostly skipped, because it was mostly just reiteration of previous concepts), but it was pretty good. Definitely not for anyone with socialist tendencies though. Gordan Gecko would love it.


I actually just finished that same book a few days ago as well. I had read The Foutainhead a few weeks ago and enjoyed it, so I wanted to read more. I skipped Galt's speech too because it looked be mostly a reiteration of Raynd's beliefs.

Yes, the Communists would burn the book on site. One person said it was one of the most dangerous books of all time - I thought it inspirational more than anything else.