2020 Reading List
- The Catcher in the Rye
Holden, the main character, tells the story of what he did following the days he got kicked out from a boarding school for doing bad in all, but one subject. It's based in East Coast and right before Christmas. He calls almost everyone a phony, he constantly smokes cigarettes and drinks despite being a seventeen years old. It seems he hates every one and the expectations society has of everyone. Most of the time he makes it appear he doesn't like people. He'll mention something bad about someone, but then in a way he retracts and he'll say nice things about them after. He likes this girl Sally. He has three siblings: older brother D.B who is a Hollywood writer, younger sister Phoebe who is really smart, and his late brother Allie. The story is told in first person and he expresses he thinking. I wasn't too crazy about the ending though.
Some key reminders: Kicked out, dad lawyer, mom nervous, sonauva, certainly, Ackey, Staedtler and Jane Gallagher, Sally, cabs, ducks in pond, Central Park, New York, Mr. Antonini couch, Maurice elevator prostitute Sunny, two nuns breakfast, necking, dough, sneaking into own parents home, Phoebe trying to leave with him, slob, snob, snotty, inferior complex, phony, frauds, cabin woods, baseball glove poems
- Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
This was a pretty good book. The great majority of the topics touched made complete sense to me, but I wonder if that's mostly because of my background in computer science. I really liked how the authors associated several computer and algorithms to those behaviors exhibited by humans and nature. I found it a bit strange, though not in a bad way how I was doing so many of the behaviors mentioned in the book already, eventhough subconciously. I am the type of person that likes to optimize and do everything I can efficiently as possible. Though this book made me realize that doing that leads to overthinking, so there's definitely a middle ground to be found. There were many anecdotes I really liked. I'll share one where the authors mentioned a boy was complaining to his mother how he had to do so many things to do and his mother told him, "Technically you don't have to do anything... you don't have to do what your teachers tell you. You don't have to do what I tell you. You don't even have to obey the law. There are consquences to everything, and you get to decide whether you want to face those consquences." Then ther was this, "Almost any piece of legislation, no matter how enlightened or misguided, will leave someone better off and someone worse off."
Some key reminders: optimal stopping, secretary problem, 37% rule. Explore/exploit, Jeff Bezos minimal regret. Sorting, nature has order, chicken beaks, book sorting bucket sort, Seattle library. Caching, there are caches all over OS, servers, processors, our closets, large memory capicity, but poor search, least recently used LRU. Scheduling, Gantt charts, many ways to go about this, priorities, weighted, context switching. Baye's rule, predictions, priors, probability of probabilities, patterns, Copernican Principle an instance of Baye's Rule, noraml/gaussian distribution, power law rich get richer, erlang, multiplicative rule, average rule, additive rule. Overfitting, Charles Darwin marriage, overthinking, overfitting makes it less generalized, cross validation, regularization, Occam's razor principle. Relaxation, intractable problems to good enough, travelling salesman problem. Randomness, Monte Carlo method (casino), primes, security, sampling, time vs space vs error, simulated annealing, serendipity, "randomness as the heart of creativity." Networking, phones circuit switching, internet packet switching, internet modeled after mail not phones, exponential backoff, ant flow control. Game theory, mathematics branch, tragedy of commons examples unlimited vacation or stores opening earlier or more days, emotions can't be control lead to irrational behavior for example outrage can override rationality, information cascade example of bidding. Computational kindness.
- JavaScript: The Good Parts
I am really happy to have read this book. Even with years of experience in JavaScript I got something out of it. No wonder it has solid reviews. I loved the railroad diagrams Crockford used to demonstrate the language rules and grammar. I had never seen railroad diagrams before! I would definitely recommend this to all JavaScript programmers, even to advanced JavaScript programmers. I can see myself reading it again in the future. I really marked it up with annotations and highlighted my copy!
- Effective JavaScript
A bit outdated, but still a really insightful book about the quirks and advanced uses of JavaScript. It was great to learn about new stuff that I wasn't aware about, definitely refreshing. I highly recommend this to anyone who uses JavaScript and is interested in learning advanced uses and some of the common pitfalls in JavaScript.