Entrepreneur Reading List

1. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
   
2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
   
3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
   
4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
   
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
   
6. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
   
7. Ikigai
   
8. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
   
9. Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
   
10. The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
    
11. Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
    
12. The Web Startup Success Guide
    
13. The Best of Guerrilla Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing Remix
    
14. From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product
    
15. This Little Program Went to Market: Create, Deploy, Distribute, Market, and Sell Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You
    
16. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
    
17. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
    
18. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to Inspire and Educate
    
19. In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
    
20. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
    
21. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
    
22. Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
    
23. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
    
24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
    
25. Eric Sink on the Business of Software
    
26. Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas
    
27. Anything You Want
    
28. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
    
29. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
    
30. Tao Te Ching
    
31. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
    
32. The Tao of Programming
    
33. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    
34. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
    
    

    Computer Science Grad School Reading List
    

    
    

35. All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
    
36. Introductory Linear Algebra: An Applied First Course
    
37. Introduction to Probability
    
38. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    
39. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
    
40. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
    
41. What Is This Thing Called Science?
    
42. The Art of Computer Programming
    
43. The Little Schemer
    
44. The Seasoned Schemer
    
45. Data Structures Using C and C++
    
46. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
    
47. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    
48. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
    
49. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing
    
50. A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming
    
51. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
    
52. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
    
53. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
    
54. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory
    
55. How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
    
56. Types and Programming Languages
    
57. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms
    
58. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Mathematical Methods
    
59. Commonsense Reasoning
    
60. Using Language
    
61. Computer Vision
    
62. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    
63. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    
    

    Video Game Development Reading List
    

    
    

64. Game Programming Gems - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
    
65. AI Game Programming Wisdom - 1 2 3 4
    
66. Making Games with Python and Pygame
    
67. Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python
    
68. Bit by Bit

Copying from a previous post on this topic:

> The Apollo computer was a really fancy calculator, and not much more.

That bit of incorrect conventional wisdom needs to die a permanent death.

I've written on this in depth before, but the Apollo Guidance Computer was considerably more than a "fancy calculator." It doesn't come off that well against a modern computer in terms of instructions per second, but thinking about the AGC as a general purpose modern computer is an incorrect characterization.

Instead, the AGC was an extremely sophisticated, purpose-built embedded controller, designed specifically around the needs of the Apollo CSM and LM and powered by complex software written by people who were literally creating out of whole cloth the entire modern field of real-time computing.

When coupled with its bespoke software, the AGC was an enormously capable machine that did things that sound suspiciously modern. For example, one of the AGC's tasks was to track the Apollo CM's "state vector" (a figure made up of the sum of all of the spacecraft's velocities and attitudes on all axes) during flight, which required floating point math. However, the AGC had no floating point hardware. So, using a program called the Interpreter (primarily written by Margaret Hamilton, the engineer whose picture pops up over and over again on /r/OldSchoolCool), the AGC could run an emulated virtual machine that did have floating point capability, and which handled all of the vector math.

The software was also sophisticated enough to keep a running task list and address those tasks in priority, even when encountering failures. See, for example, the infamous 1201/1202 errors that occurred during the Apollo 11 landing (the errors are commonly attributed to a checklist error, but that is incorrect).


If you'd like some real in-depth reading on the ins and outs of the AGC and how it behaved in flight, Apollo vet and MIT alum Don Eyles has the best write-up on the entire Internet, way better than my explanation. You don't have to take my word about the AGC at all, but you definitely should listen to Eyles because he was there :D

edited to add - I highly recommend O'Brien's The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation for a solid deep-dive on the AGC's capabilities—it's pretty close to the perfect reference text. There are a few inaccuracies and omissions, but the book strikes an excellent balance between being deeply technical and also deeply readable.

edit^2 - Don Eyles has a just put out a book that I'm plowing my way through. It's excellent so far.

tl;dr Apollo computer stronk. Have small memory but land on Moon anyway and defeat Communism in space.

> I'll have to look into the FSM but it sounds like you're 'robbing' from content creators so I don't think it's ethical to pirate anything.

Yeah, I understand the traditional argument, but there are plenty of powerful arguments against it as well. This is where I got it from if you're interested.

> I fall more on the socialist side but have disagreements with a complete abolishment of all elements of capitalism. I'm not too well versed on the language used by socialist however so my aversion to abolishment of private property might stem from that.

Yeah, its difficult to find a place to even begin learning about it, and even more confusing when you find out it has a very hybridized history. Market Socialists for example, fully accept Capital Markets, Wage Labor, all of the traditional elements of a Capitalist system, but differ radically on key aspects like the organizational character of the firm. China's a Market Socialist economy and its the 2nd largest economy in the world.

Navigating your way through the terms is half the conversation. But if you're ever interested, I can reference you works and why they're important.

> Inequality in the sense that some people will have more material goods than others. Some means of production will be unequally compensated compared to others.

It'd help me if you had a more concrete example.

> What exactly is your position then? Im only scrutinizing socialism because it sounds ideal but some aspects are difficult to achieve. I have much more criticism of capitalism than socialism

I'm a Socialist. I believe in the concept of Workers' Self-Management. I would like the abolition of Private Property Rights as imagined by Capitalists. I want a world where Capital serves Labor instead of Labor serving Capital. I would like a more equitable society.

I am not a Market Socialist. However, insofar as Market Socialism is more near term to be realistically achievable, I would make moves to establish that kind of society before the harder transition to Socialism (Proper) can be addressed or undertaken.

Not just banks, but all kinds of computations. Probably the first examples of organized computation dealt with astronomical data, such as computing the orbit of Halley's Comet or creating tables for navigational almanacs.

I just finished this book on the subject, and found it absolutely fascinating. Highly recommended if you're interested in historical/scientific stuff.

Actually, go ahead and take a look at this one too. Computers were mostly given one set of instructions to compute at a time and the big picture was left to the few people in charge. This book offers great account of the origins of our modern scientific method (in the same time period as some of the first book), and of course a look at a very different part of the scientific world of the day.

Apollo's guidance calculations aren't really all that computationally intensive. In-atmosphere is more complex than in a vacuum, but you don't need much computing horsepower to go to the moon.

Omega Tau has a great episode on the Apollo guidance computer that goes into a ton of detail on this. Very much worth a listen (the guest's book is also great - https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture-Operation/dp/1441908765).

NASA definitely did not develop the microprocessor, but they did play a huge role in spurring their advance.

The choice for apollo to have a transistor based, all digital computer was a very risky one. It ended up consuming a huge amount of resources and became a very critical aspect of the mission.

The advancements that were made in the speed and reliability, as well as pushing the state of the art in programming, had a huge affect on computation. To read an excellent book on the apollo digital computer and its development, read Digital Apollo

This is a tough topic to discuss without delving into conspiracy theories. The problem of which is that they're difficult to prove.

For example: Tim Tzouliadis wrote a book called The Forsaken which was about the emigration of thousands of Americans to the Soviet Union during the height of the Depression. Many of these Americans bought into the hype that things in the Soviet Union were going amazingly well. Food was cheap, jobs were plentiful, people had homes to live in. Many Black Americans also went over because they wanted to embrace the supposed racial equality that the communists espoused. So many Americans emigrated over that Russian cities had baseball teams that played against one another.

Henry Ford even worked with the Russians to build a factory there to build Ford automobiles. For a time, things were going well for Americans in the USSR. The Soviets accepted them as brothers and sisters in socialism. That was until the Purges happened. The Americans in the USSR had their passports confiscated, they were denied protection by the US Embassy, and they were all sent out to Siberia to mine gold in what can be considered to be "death camps". President FDR and his predecessors were aware of this, but did nothing. To them, these Americans who renounced their nation and abandoned it were themselves abandoned to the Soviets.

The big thing here is the confiscated passports. The KGB (technically the NKVD at the time) supposedly confiscated them all and then used them to ship spies back to the US with a singular goal in mind: to infiltrate the United States of America. There were thousands of these people, all with stolen US passports, trained to infiltrate various academic, political, and industrial institutions to form the backbone of the spy network that would plague the United States for decades.

The "Conspiracy" part of this is that these agents worked with domestic Communist and Socialist types to bring about a plan to influence America over time by taking control of the newspapers and the educational systems to push their socialist message. Does any proof of this exist? No. But this is the nature of most conspiracies. With great influence in the media and education, these folks could easily work within these liberal organizations and hide their true motivations. To be fair, there isn't much for them to organize as these institutions tended to be quite progressive under normal conditions, but this is simply great cover to push their agenda on generations of Americans.

A lot of great suggestions here.. I'd just like to recommend this book as something you might enjoy reading :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/dp/0596523203

I highly recommend 'The Dream Machine' which is the book my parents bought for me in the 90's for the same reason; and I went on to study Comp Sci and a career in Software Development! Still remember how inspiring I found this book's stories; it covers the companies and people involved in key computing developments, as well as early approaches to robotics. The many photographs and illustrations keep it engaging.

Thank you this video was great. Are there more of these?

There is also a book I recommend by Eldon Hall, who is in the video: Journey to the Moon
It includes a lot more detail about each of the systems and components, as well as the software development and descriptions of the vendor selections and some astronaut visit stories.

The most interesting book I read about the Apollo Guidance Computer is "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation". It is a very technical (and often quite dry) book. But if you can get past the dryness it can be fascinating. It really made me appreciate the ingenuity of the engineers of that era. Doing a lot, with a little. Some familiarity with computer architecture is recommended.

What a coincidence.... the day you posted that photo i was reading your book :-). It was a great read, btw, i love reading such "diary/autobiography-like" books (i also read A Microsoft Life yesterday by Stephen Toulouse).

Amazon links for books mentioned in this thread:

\/u/thetrueonion (OP)

• Digital Apollo, David A. Mindell    -    Other books by this author
  
  
• Eagles of Mitsubishi, Jiro Horikoshi
  
  
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard P. Feynman    -    Other books by this author
  
  
• A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking    -    Other books by this author
  
  
• Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, John D. Clark
  
  \/u/llothar:
  
  
• Amazon.com's list of books authored by Richard Feynman
  
  
• The Martian, Andy Weir
  
  \/u/DallasGreen:
  
  
• Closest I could find was Engineering and the Mind's Eye, Eugene S. Ferguson
  
  \/u/gearnut:
  
  
• Slide Rule, Nevil Shute    -    Other books by this author
  
  \/u/frothysasquatch:
  
  
• Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America, Patrick M. Malone
  
  \/u/Beefstyles:
  
  
• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed, Ben R. Rich
  
  \/u/CalledCaptainHook:
  
  
• One Second After, William R. Forstchen    -    Other books by this author
  
  \/u/75footubi:
  
  
• The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, David McCullough
  
  \/u/Bradm77:
  
  
• The Soul of A New Machine, Tracy Kidder

Different system, same sentiment.

Edit: I should have added: looks awesome! I love and miss that style.

This book might help. (I haven't read it, I just remember seeing it and putting it on my Amazon wish-list for a mythical time when I'm off work for long enough that reading code recreationally seems like a good idea.)

The Pragmatic Programmer, which lead to this wonderful bookshelf (scroll down, it's the last book listed).

The Mythical Man Month. Pretty much required reading.

Darwin Among the Machines. Not exactly programming, but a damn good read.

Not a book, but an article that most programmers would find interesting:
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

David Mindell's "Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight" and Frank O'Brien's "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" give us a wealth of useful detail about all of the computer technology used in the Apollo program.

They include the details of the computers that ran on the orbiting and landing craft, as well as those on the ground.

The author of that article, Jo Marchant, wrote a pretty good book about the Antikythera Mechanism. It's definitely worth a read.

If you enjoyed this video you might enjoy this book: The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation.

This was an excellent book on almost that exact subject way back in the day. It's more than a little dated now, but still a good read.

If you were genuinely interested then you could read “The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation” by Frank O’Brien. A detailed 460 page book that covers it very well.

Or you could read NASA’s published texts about it (this overview is a good start)

Or you could play with the Virtual AGC simulator on your PC.

Or you could study the source code on github

But I suspect you’d rather remain ignorant and make unfounded claims about how impossible it was. 🙄

IMO, the most accessible and complete account of the computer control involved in bringing Apollo to the Moon can be found in the wonderful book Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight, published by MIT Press. There, you'll find everything you wanted to know about Apollo onboard computers, and then some. ;-)

There were already a bunch of Americans who "fled" to Russia and it worked out pretty well for them.

If you haven't read it already I highly recommend the book [Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight] (https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spaceflight/dp/0262516101). Really fascinating and detailed read. It delves in detail of the development of the Apollo digital computer. It also talks extensively about the tension between analog and digital and control from a pilot's perspective verses the engineers.

It's not one of these ebooks. It's just a different book about NASA. So it's also not free, unfortunately. But still a great book!

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spaceflight/dp/0262516101

I got this book from randomly reading an online reddit post, so I'll spread the word myself.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris introduces John Brockman’s new anthology, “Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI,” in conversation with three of its authors: George Dyson, Alison Gopnik, and Stuart Russell.

George Dyson is a historian of technology. He is also the author of Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral.

Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley and a leader in the field of children’s learning and development. Her books include The Philosophical Baby.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the author of (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the most widely used textbook on AI.

Documentary

Excellent Book

Be careful though, this thing engulfed my interest.

Read this book. It contains (almost?) all the information you seek. It's also wonderfully written.

Journey to the moon, excellent book

Great find!

See also The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.

There's a really good book about it

Article

If Apollo tech geekery is your thing, the book Digital Apollo is a really interesting look at the human-machine interface of the moon missions

For more on this subject, I highly recommend this book:

The Chinese Typewriter: A History (The MIT Press) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262036363/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_V3b9BbMN8PC7K

I'd highly recommend Frank O'Brien's book The Apollo Guidance Computer for a tour of the hardware and software that landed humanity on the Moon.

If you ever find the time, here's the emulator: http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/download.html

And a book to help out: http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture/dp/1441908765/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405920091&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Apollo+Guidance+Computer%3A+Architecture+and+Operation

You may be interested in this book. I haven't read it yet, it's on my to do list.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture/dp/1441908765

The onboard Apollo Guidance Computer could do trigonometric calculations (which depend indirectly on the value of pi) to about 8 decimal digits of precision. (Check out this book if you want the gory details.)

• Tree of Knowledge - Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco Varela
  
• The Dream Machine - M. Mitchell Waldrop
  
• Animal Farm - George Orwell

Check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/B00008MNVW/ref=pd_sim_b_39

It might get you a little further as to who you'd think would be in a photo like that.

In addition to Solzhenitsyn, I would recommend the book The Forsaken which is about Americans volunteering to build socialism in the Soviet Union.

Ehh...it happened in the Great Depression when several thousand Americans went to the Soviet Russia (yes really) to escape economic or racial hardships.

It's pretty well documented.

The man who loved only numbers (on Erdos)

The imitation game Alan Turing: The Enigma (on Turing, much more in depth (and accurate) than the movie on both the life and mathematics).

And not a biography per say, When Computers Were Human, but there is a lot of focus on the people involved.

If you want to spend some money in a book: Digital Apollo.

Have you read "Digital Apollo"? If not you should.

Check out this book (or at least the table of contents)

https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/dp/0596523203/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482273553&sr=8-1&keywords=the+geek+atlas

The Forsaken also deals with this for much of the book, and has a bunch of additional stuff that Razorfist might not be aware of/didn't cover.

There are many stories in Russian about this. But you should probably find a Timotheos Tsuladis book on this topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Forsaken-American-Tragedy-Stalins-Russia/dp/0143115421

Also The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation, which goes into an alarming amount of detail

Some of the POW camps in Germany were liberated by the Red Army, which sent many of the US POWs on rail cars to work in the Gulag.

This was a subtopic in an excellent book by Tim Tzouliadis about Americans who went to the USSR and never came back. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia

The Forsaken It's about what happened to Americans who emigrated to Russia during the 1930s. Mostly they died in gulags. A good read.

If you've got the time, go read the book "Digital Apollo" (Amazon Link) which details a lot of the political and technical problems they had with early space development.

Basically astronauts came over from test pilots and they were very much against automatic controls and taking a back seat to computers. When engineers realised that they needed fly-by-wire at the very minimum to make spaceflight happen, there was much protesting from test pilots who still wanted to have manual actuation of control surfaces and attitude jets "just in case".

When they developed the Saturn V, even though it was obvious that the reaction speed of a human being was in no way going to cut it, it still took a huge amount of convincing for them to finally get the idea that the pilots were going to be just passengers until they reached orbit. A few of the pioneer astronauts (Glenn and Armstrong most notably) knew the deal and knew they needed computer assistance, but there were quite a few holdouts. Even Armstrong's "manual override of the computer" on Apollo 11 still resulted in him using fly-by-wire to make a landing - he was basically just directing the computer to "move over here a bit, and descend at this rate" and it did all the hard work of balancing the spacecraft on its one engine.

This undercurrent of manual control still existed in the Astronaut corps when the Shuttle came along and they still wanted a guy in the seat flicking switches.

> "It was the most accurate landing to that point in history."

Given the fact that the descent was uncontrolled, this was a mere coincidence. Generally, people have sucked at controlling spacecrafts manually since the very beginnings of spaceflight, and will continue to do so. (I'd like to remind you of the fine book Digital Apollo at this point.)

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