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The Books that Shaped my Career: Part II

Some books I read during college part two.

Since some of you asked for part II, I wrote this list of books that I most benefitted from in my career, and that actually stuck with me.

I really enjoyed math and physics at the beginning, but after a while, I found my passion in computer science and so I shifted my learning habits into a “read less, build more” mindset.

If I were to go back, I would’ve spent more time building apps and websites to solve my own problems, instead of reading books.

The great lesson I learned in engineering is: you can probably read all the books about how to build a bridge in it’s most advanced techniques, but won’t know how to build a simple one for a small town, unless you practice and apply your knowledge. The same goes with neural networks, robotics, etc.

The list:

  1. Cracking the Coding Interview | By Gayle Laakmann McDowell

  2. The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book | By Andriy Burkov

  3. Deep Learning | By Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville

  4. Designing Machine Learning Systems | By Chip Huyen

  5. Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow | By Aurelien Geron

  6. DeepLearning with Python | By Francois Chollet

  7. Ace the Data Science Interview | By Kevin Huo, Nick Singh

  8. Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Desing | By Robert Martin

  9. The Rust Programming Language (*) | By Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols

  10. The C++ Programming Language | By Bjarne Stroustrup

  11. Case in Point: Complete Case Interview Preparation (read some chapters for fun) | By Marc Cosentino

  12. Elements of Programming Interviews in Java (*) | By Adnan Aziz, Amit Prakash, and Tsung-Hsien Lee

  13. Reinforcement Learning, An Introduction | By Andrew Barto, Richard Sutton

  14. Machine Learning Design Patterns | By Valliappa Lakshmanan, Sara Robinson, Michael Munn

  15. ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots | By Anil Mahtani, Enrique Fernandez, and Luis Sanchez

  16. Designing Data-Intensive Applications (*) | By Martin Kleppmann

  17. Systems Design Interview: An Insider’s Guide (*) | By Alex Xu

  18. Cracking the PM Interview | By Gayle Laakman McDowell

  19. Pro Git | By Ben Straub and Scott Chacon

  20. Elements of Programming Interviews in Python | By Adnan Aziz, Amit Prakash, and Tsung-Hsien Lee

  21. Grokking Algorithms | By Aditya Y. Bhargava

  22. Introduction to Algorithms | By Thomas H. Cormen et al

  23. Introduction to the Theory Computation | By Michael Sipser

  24. Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment | By W. Richard Stevens

  25. The Elements of Statistical Learning | By Jerome H. Friedman et al

  26. Mathematics for Machine Learning | By A. Aldo Faisal et al

  27. Deep Learning with PyTorch | By Eli Stevens et al

  28. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning | By Christopher Bishop

  29. Datastructures and Algorithms in Python | By Michael H. Goldwasser, et al

  30. Machine Learning, A Probabilistic Perspective | Kevin P. Murphy

  31. Differential Equations | By Paul Dawkins

  32. Signals & Systems | Alan V. Oppenheim, Alan S. Willsky

  33. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies | By Nick Bostrom

  34. The C Programming Language | By Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie

  35. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher | By Richard Feynman

  36. Modern Control Engineering | By Katsuhiko Ogata

  37. Modern Control Systems | By Richard C. Dorf, and Robert H. Bishop

  38. Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down | By J. E. Gordon

  39. Linear and Nonlinear Programming | By David G. Luenberger, Yinyu Ye

  40. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship | By Robert Martin

  41. Introduction to Thermodynamics | By Yunus A Cengel

  42. Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach | By Michael A. Boles, Yunus A Cengel

  43. Fluid Mechanics: Fundamentals and Applications | By Yunus A Cengel, John M. Cimbala

  44. Heat and Mass Transfer | By Yunus A Cengel et al

  45. An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers | By G. H. Hardy

  46. Mechanics of Materials | By R. C. Hibbeler

  47. Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics | By R. C. Hibbeler

  48. Engineering Mechanics: Statics | By R. C. Hibbeler

  49. Calculus | By James Stewart

  50. Multivariable Calculus | By James Stewart

Whether you’re just starting out in your career or you’re looking to take the next step, I hope this list of books will inspire you to continue learning and growing!

NB: for a more thorough collection of books on startups, sci-fi, history, and books that sit on the intersection of must-read and entertaining check out my Goodreads account.