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The Memory Book - Fantastic, maybe not always practical unless you have a lot of practice, but extremely useful to at least understand some of the strategies to

The Memory Book - Fantastic, maybe not always practical unless you have a lot of practice, but extremely useful to at least understand some of the strategies to memorizing strings Understanding Weatherfax - for an attempted (and failed) circumnavigation Sail Power Kon Tiki Shogun Art of the Sailor Business Adventures Metamorphoses (by Ovid, not Kafka) Guns, Germs, Steel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - this book had so many rave reviews. it has a tremendous hook and style for the first 50 pages, but overall I thought it was terrible Cryptonomicon -- fantastic Simulacra and simulation -- started, but I need to start over. this is not an easy read... Predictably Irrational -- another book with great reviews, but reading this book was not time well spent. the author just summarizes psychology experiments with pages of dumbed down explanations and tedious anecdotes The Alliance -- read this on my last day at my old job, a good reminder on the social contract between you and your employer and how it should be mutually beneficial, lots of boring filler though Triple your reading speed -- I wanted to take a speed reading course when I was in elementary school, but my dad thought it was a waste of time. I think I really missed out on something, but late is better than never. Siddhartha -- rereading of one of my favorite books of all time The Alchemist -- rereading of one of my favorite books of all time Jazz (by Leveaux) The Jazz Piano Book Mastering the Piano Big Blue Book of bicycle maintenance Probability (by Pitman) -- its embarassing statistics/probability isn't a required course in many programs Elements of Statistical Learning Advanced Analytics with Spark -- feels like this book was published only 80% done Optimization Models (by Calafiore and El Ghaoui) -- going to finish this is 2016 Functional Programming with Scala -- going to finish this is 2016 Linux Programming Interface -- going to finish this is 2016 Finished 18 books cover to cover in 2015, 6 of which were textbooks/academic texts. Currently have 7 in progress, 2 of which are piano workbooks and 3 are textbooks. Goal for 2016 is 30 books cover to cover, at least 8 textbooks/academic texts.

sp527 11y ago
Could you expand a bit on your inclusion of 'Elements of Statistical Learning'? That book is essentially the holy grail of ML understanding and I find it difficult to believe you were able to grasp any meaningful proportion of it in what must have been a very condensed span of reading/study time. But maybe you're some kind of genius, in which case pardon me.
- laxatives 11y ago
  No you're right, I read/skimmed it cover to cover, but that doesn't do that book justice. I didn't do a single exercise and I really focused on the sections that were relevant to what I was doing (Random Forests, testing/validation). The author recommends maybe 4 or 5 chapters as required reading in the forward so I read those much more thoroughly, but again, skipped all of the exercises and the appendices. At the end of the day though, I'm not going to be implementing these algorithms, I'm just using existing libraries so I couldn't really justify the year+ of effort to go in depth on everything. That book is also a summarization of a lot of techniques. If you wanted more depth, I wouldn't think Elements of Statistical Learning is the book for it. I'm hoping to get fill in some of those gaps through reading Optimization Models a bit more closely.
laxatives 11y ago
Forgot about Dancing Naked in the Mindfield -- similiar to Surely You Must Be Joking. the author is the inventor of PCR and has some pretty outlandish stories fueled by hallucinogens Also going to read Infinite Jest while I'm traveling the next few weeks.

sp527 11y ago

Could you expand a bit on your inclusion of 'Elements of Statistical Learning'? That book is essentially the holy grail of ML understanding and I find it difficult to believe you were able to grasp any meaningful proportion of it in what must have been a very condensed span of reading/study time. But maybe you're some kind of genius, in which case pardon me.

laxatives 11y ago
No you're right, I read/skimmed it cover to cover, but that doesn't do that book justice. I didn't do a single exercise and I really focused on the sections that were relevant to what I was doing (Random Forests, testing/validation). The author recommends maybe 4 or 5 chapters as required reading in the forward so I read those much more thoroughly, but again, skipped all of the exercises and the appendices. At the end of the day though, I'm not going to be implementing these algorithms, I'm just using existing libraries so I couldn't really justify the year+ of effort to go in depth on everything. That book is also a summarization of a lot of techniques. If you wanted more depth, I wouldn't think Elements of Statistical Learning is the book for it. I'm hoping to get fill in some of those gaps through reading Optimization Models a bit more closely.

laxatives 11y ago

Forgot about Dancing Naked in the Mindfield -- similiar to Surely You Must Be Joking. the author is the inventor of PCR and has some pretty outlandish stories fueled by hallucinogens Also going to read Infinite Jest while I'm traveling the next few weeks.