Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?
Pls provide link if the course materials are available anywhere.
"The Annotated Turing" - I didn't know you could meaningfully intertwine biography and technical analysis like that.
Not a book or course per say, but based on a book:
The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" by Venkat [0]
Other contenders:
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [1]
Haseeb qureshi's articles on Negotiating [2]
These along with er... mind-altering substances, helped me see that reality as we live it (careers, status, institutions, ect) is like software: built/programmed by humans and can be changed by shifting your perspective.
[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGhTQ4iruLc&list=PLfc2WtGuVP...
[2] https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...
Two books I read after 9/11 shaped my path greatly:
1.) Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police
ISBN #: 0813337445
2.) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
ISBN #: 9780671728694
Both should be available in most public libraries, but with the ISBN you can usually get almost anything via inter-library loan.
>The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
An amazing book. I'm not sure how it's particularly career-path-impacting, but it is fascinating being able to follow the cause and effect chain in Germany leading up to and all through the war (in excruciating detail).
Programming Perl, 1st Ed. from Larry Wall. The three great virtues of a programmer were enlightening for a fresh-outta-college beginner.
Data Smart, by John Foreman. Out of print, but you can get it from Abe Books: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/data-smart-using-...
Why it is cool?
Because instead of R, Gadoop, Spark, Python, whatever... it started explaining data science with excel.
The best part for me was optimization.
The Boy's Second book of Electronics by Alfred Morgan(1957) introduced me to electronics circa 1975, and lead to a technical mindset and lifestyle.
"The C Programming Language", by Kernighan and Ritchie.
A digital electronics design course I took at the local science museum when I was 11. It was free, so what the heck, I took it on a whim. I didn't know it at the time, but it set the course of my career for the rest of my life even though I'm a software, not electronic, engineer.
for me it was learning devops