
N + 7 useful books
Hello! This is another traditional list of books that have been useful for the year. Purely subjective, of course. But I seriously expect that you will prompt more cool things to read.

Think slowly, decide quickly - Daniel Kahneman
This is the most magical thing that has happened in recent years in terms of geek literature. This thing sequentially opens up cognitive distortion and teaches you how to tune your mind. It’s exciting. In general, the approach to the fact that thinking is a set of techniques that can be trained and honed is probably more correct than the “this is shamanism” approach. Kahneman, unlike the next book on the list, showing the features of reverse thinking, does not provide new techniques - but shows where and what mistakes we make in ordinary processes. Such a serious brain debag.
Game Theory - Avinash Dixit and Barry Neilbuff
The MIF suddenly released a very good game theory book. What is very important, this application is quite close to reality. Because the second author is Barry Nae ... Nalebuff. In general, when you look at his course on Kurser about negotiations and mathematics (which I highly recommend doing), you will understand why I have typos in his last name. He says and does logical things, but every time he has a face that categorically does not want to believe. And returning to the book, it gives a very good binding to how laws are formed, why not the most beautiful lady wins at beauty contests, and so on. But I'm not sure that this book alone is enough, because you still need to know the mathematical apparatus and a bunch of applications - I once went into the theory of games from biology and urbanism, and was very happy with this book.
Ray Dalio - Principles
In general, I almost refused this book because it did not fit into my bag. But there was an autograph of this dude unknown to me, and decided that he should be respected. Because I remember how painfully difficult it is to sign books. Then I found out that he brought the stripper to the congress of landowners. And I thought that the man knows a lot about unconventional thinking. As it turned out, the hypothesis was true, this is a damn useful book. But only if you are the leader of a large team. I caught up with a bunch of everything from there for about another six months, because it’s interesting not only what he wrote, but also why he has it so, and how other parts of the company are struggling with it. Then this book was presented to me a couple more times, the last time - TM after speaking at a seminar about Habr)
Makarenko - My education system. Educational poem.
For quite some time I did not understand what the joke was precisely Makarenko, because there was another no less epic colony of homeless children of the same period, which is even better - the name of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. So, it turned out that this is what came out of the pupils of Makarenko and a lot of funding. And he created everything from scratch, even worse than from scratch - he was nearly beaten by the first homeless children, and he almost started shooting at them in the first chapter. A man in fact discovered the system of Soviet education and showed how to socialize group dynamics. And it all reads like Rimworld in half with a thriller, because in each chapter there are either epic skirmishes, or massive injuries, or a theater detachment feels the love of the villagers. It’s worth reading, if only for the start of the chapter on the theater squad, if everything else is alien to you.
45 tattoos sold - Batyrev
I don't like the way the book is written. I do not like the oozing advertisement in half with fat. But there are really useful practices there, and there isn’t much of them anywhere else in Russian. Therefore, you should endure and read. Well, it is read at times easier than textbooks.
Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die - Dan Heath
Social Engineering Textbook. I am adding it to a beautiful collection from The Art of Speech at Judgment, The Second Most Ancient, Confession of the Obsessed with Efficiency and About Children, the Sun, Summer and the Newspaper. By the way, the last thing from this list can only be found on paper. And as for Hiza, it’s almost a tutorial on how to work with product launches.
Magical Cleaning - Marie Condo
Konmari is a very fashionable Japanese woman from America, who was burned by colleagues when we exchanged lists of our favorite books on the road (this is one of the travel traditions). It would never occur to me that you can read a book about cleaning. As well as the fact that someone wrote it, and this is not GOST for cleaning different strategic objects. In general, you first read it, and then throw it out fucking half an apartment. And you can no longer look at anything around calmly. Because she teaches that everything around from objects should bring joy. Take each item in hand and ask yourself if you would like to see it again. If in doubt for at least half a second - throw it away. As a result, 2-3 objects remain in the apartment where there was a whole room or a whole cupboard. And a side effect is that after 20-30 pilgrimages to the garbage bin, the skill is fixed, and you also begin to relate to goals in life and thoughts. I advise.
Predictable Irrationality - Dan Arieli
It's almost like Kahneman above, just a sunset from the other side. Presuppositions and influence on the context of decision-making, many hacks of a person. It’s like a book about military propaganda, written in peacetime and for peaceful purposes. Well, or I took it that way.
Engage and conquer - Kevin Werbach, Dan Hunter
Werbach - also a familiar erysipelas with Kursery, the old troll and gamification specialist. The book teaches what and how in this story - from educational program to normal techniques. Want to quickly understand the issue - read here. I suspect that about these mechanics is the future of education.
Designing languages - Alexander Piperski
In general, this is the most useless book in the world, which at the same time can teach a lot. It is about artificially created languages (and I'm not talking about C ++ now, but about colloquial like Esperanto). Different approaches to how to express thoughts. Different frameworks. Different tasks of the languages themselves. The farther into the forest, the more interesting. Here is one example: tokipon. A language created to express only good thoughts. Architecturally, this is an assembler of 120 word operators, each of which is neutral or positive in meaning, and very “cute” in pronunciation. The phrase “Did you piss whether they poured” - the macro “small animal-separator-kind” - if you add “dog” to the macro, it will be “cute puppy”. If you add a "fox", then there will be "this fox is friendly" - it all depends on the context. Of course, the macro “dog” or “fox” is also collected from these operators. The result is either a completely wildly indefinite language, consisting only of pointers to a context in the head of the interlocutors (the analogue is Russian mate without ordinary speech), or a macro assembler. Attempts to speak these languages wildly change thinking. Well, or at least enough to understand how they are arranged.
The science of the brain and the myth of self. The tunnel of the ego. - Thomas Metzinger.
About cognitive distortions, psychos and self-perception. After reading, the feeling remains that the person is a release that may fall from a couple of changes in the configuration file. Or just like that. There is more to reverse engineering of a person than something practically applicable, but, damn it, how our wind is staggered!
And here are the past selections: first , second , third , fourth , fifth , sixth . And spinoff about children's books of social engineering. And already a tradition: please share a non-fiction book in the comments if you think that it was useful to you.
UPD:
- meda1ex advises: Jordan Ellenberg - “How not to be mistaken. The power of mathematical thinking ”:“ In short, in it the author shows the application of mathematics in real life. ”
- nad_oby recommends “The ABC of the bodyguard” by Kozlov: “Very much if you do exercises from it in a very different way, you begin to evaluate the space.”
- HedgeSky - “Jedi Techniques” by Maxim Dorofeev: “It shows how to stop forgetting about various small tasks, save nerves and concentration (thereby getting less tired), make better decisions and achieve goals that you always wanted to achieve, but how- it’s not enough time. ” + “Write, shorten” Ilyakhov and Sarycheva: “About writing interesting and useful texts with care for the reader.”
-bevalorous - “Antifragility” by Nassim Taleb: “It allows you to see in a whole new way how to properly manage any risks and how living / developing systems differ from dead / stagnant ones. Plus a bunch of very interesting facts and reasoning along the way. ”
- kovyilin advises a bunch of everything.
- darthslider - “A Word About Words” by Leo Uspensky: “Very entertaining. They [books] are very stylistically oriented towards children, but adults are also very interested. ”
- zzzmmtt - Robert Kiyosaki: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and “Cash Flow Quadrant” - “It helps to understand the principles of money flow, the principles of enrichment, and it can also motivate someone to change their life radically.”
-8_gramm - “Living as Life” by Korney Chukovsky: “It turned out that he is not only the author of children's books, but also an excellent translator and writer of books for translators ... about the development of the language, about different borrowings and changes in words. It is very easy to read. A lot of irony in the text. And how he walks around the stationery, it’s a pleasure to watch. ”
- brom_portret is a list .
- aRomanyuk advises another list .
- prudnitskiyDesmond Morris's “Naked Monkey” - “It's amazingly funny to see how the most complex features of human behavior and motivation are based on our animal instinctive past. You begin to look differently at the "crown of creation." + “The Biology of Good and Evil” (Behave: Biology of humans at our best and worst) by Robert Sapolsky.
- DS28 - “Russian with a Dictionary” by Irina Levontina, - “I entered the short list of the Enlightener Prize.”
- CryptoPirate - “12 Rules for Life,” Jordan Peterson: “Peterson has a very interesting and orderly argument with examples from his practice (he is a psychiatrist and professor at the university) and life.”

Think slowly, decide quickly - Daniel Kahneman
This is the most magical thing that has happened in recent years in terms of geek literature. This thing sequentially opens up cognitive distortion and teaches you how to tune your mind. It’s exciting. In general, the approach to the fact that thinking is a set of techniques that can be trained and honed is probably more correct than the “this is shamanism” approach. Kahneman, unlike the next book on the list, showing the features of reverse thinking, does not provide new techniques - but shows where and what mistakes we make in ordinary processes. Such a serious brain debag.
Game Theory - Avinash Dixit and Barry Neilbuff
The MIF suddenly released a very good game theory book. What is very important, this application is quite close to reality. Because the second author is Barry Nae ... Nalebuff. In general, when you look at his course on Kurser about negotiations and mathematics (which I highly recommend doing), you will understand why I have typos in his last name. He says and does logical things, but every time he has a face that categorically does not want to believe. And returning to the book, it gives a very good binding to how laws are formed, why not the most beautiful lady wins at beauty contests, and so on. But I'm not sure that this book alone is enough, because you still need to know the mathematical apparatus and a bunch of applications - I once went into the theory of games from biology and urbanism, and was very happy with this book.
Ray Dalio - Principles
In general, I almost refused this book because it did not fit into my bag. But there was an autograph of this dude unknown to me, and decided that he should be respected. Because I remember how painfully difficult it is to sign books. Then I found out that he brought the stripper to the congress of landowners. And I thought that the man knows a lot about unconventional thinking. As it turned out, the hypothesis was true, this is a damn useful book. But only if you are the leader of a large team. I caught up with a bunch of everything from there for about another six months, because it’s interesting not only what he wrote, but also why he has it so, and how other parts of the company are struggling with it. Then this book was presented to me a couple more times, the last time - TM after speaking at a seminar about Habr)
Makarenko - My education system. Educational poem.
For quite some time I did not understand what the joke was precisely Makarenko, because there was another no less epic colony of homeless children of the same period, which is even better - the name of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. So, it turned out that this is what came out of the pupils of Makarenko and a lot of funding. And he created everything from scratch, even worse than from scratch - he was nearly beaten by the first homeless children, and he almost started shooting at them in the first chapter. A man in fact discovered the system of Soviet education and showed how to socialize group dynamics. And it all reads like Rimworld in half with a thriller, because in each chapter there are either epic skirmishes, or massive injuries, or a theater detachment feels the love of the villagers. It’s worth reading, if only for the start of the chapter on the theater squad, if everything else is alien to you.
45 tattoos sold - Batyrev
I don't like the way the book is written. I do not like the oozing advertisement in half with fat. But there are really useful practices there, and there isn’t much of them anywhere else in Russian. Therefore, you should endure and read. Well, it is read at times easier than textbooks.
Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die - Dan Heath
Social Engineering Textbook. I am adding it to a beautiful collection from The Art of Speech at Judgment, The Second Most Ancient, Confession of the Obsessed with Efficiency and About Children, the Sun, Summer and the Newspaper. By the way, the last thing from this list can only be found on paper. And as for Hiza, it’s almost a tutorial on how to work with product launches.
Magical Cleaning - Marie Condo
Konmari is a very fashionable Japanese woman from America, who was burned by colleagues when we exchanged lists of our favorite books on the road (this is one of the travel traditions). It would never occur to me that you can read a book about cleaning. As well as the fact that someone wrote it, and this is not GOST for cleaning different strategic objects. In general, you first read it, and then throw it out fucking half an apartment. And you can no longer look at anything around calmly. Because she teaches that everything around from objects should bring joy. Take each item in hand and ask yourself if you would like to see it again. If in doubt for at least half a second - throw it away. As a result, 2-3 objects remain in the apartment where there was a whole room or a whole cupboard. And a side effect is that after 20-30 pilgrimages to the garbage bin, the skill is fixed, and you also begin to relate to goals in life and thoughts. I advise.
Predictable Irrationality - Dan Arieli
It's almost like Kahneman above, just a sunset from the other side. Presuppositions and influence on the context of decision-making, many hacks of a person. It’s like a book about military propaganda, written in peacetime and for peaceful purposes. Well, or I took it that way.
Engage and conquer - Kevin Werbach, Dan Hunter
Werbach - also a familiar erysipelas with Kursery, the old troll and gamification specialist. The book teaches what and how in this story - from educational program to normal techniques. Want to quickly understand the issue - read here. I suspect that about these mechanics is the future of education.
Designing languages - Alexander Piperski
In general, this is the most useless book in the world, which at the same time can teach a lot. It is about artificially created languages (and I'm not talking about C ++ now, but about colloquial like Esperanto). Different approaches to how to express thoughts. Different frameworks. Different tasks of the languages themselves. The farther into the forest, the more interesting. Here is one example: tokipon. A language created to express only good thoughts. Architecturally, this is an assembler of 120 word operators, each of which is neutral or positive in meaning, and very “cute” in pronunciation. The phrase “Did you piss whether they poured” - the macro “small animal-separator-kind” - if you add “dog” to the macro, it will be “cute puppy”. If you add a "fox", then there will be "this fox is friendly" - it all depends on the context. Of course, the macro “dog” or “fox” is also collected from these operators. The result is either a completely wildly indefinite language, consisting only of pointers to a context in the head of the interlocutors (the analogue is Russian mate without ordinary speech), or a macro assembler. Attempts to speak these languages wildly change thinking. Well, or at least enough to understand how they are arranged.
The science of the brain and the myth of self. The tunnel of the ego. - Thomas Metzinger.
About cognitive distortions, psychos and self-perception. After reading, the feeling remains that the person is a release that may fall from a couple of changes in the configuration file. Or just like that. There is more to reverse engineering of a person than something practically applicable, but, damn it, how our wind is staggered!
And here are the past selections: first , second , third , fourth , fifth , sixth . And spinoff about children's books of social engineering. And already a tradition: please share a non-fiction book in the comments if you think that it was useful to you.
UPD:
- meda1ex advises: Jordan Ellenberg - “How not to be mistaken. The power of mathematical thinking ”:“ In short, in it the author shows the application of mathematics in real life. ”
- nad_oby recommends “The ABC of the bodyguard” by Kozlov: “Very much if you do exercises from it in a very different way, you begin to evaluate the space.”
- HedgeSky - “Jedi Techniques” by Maxim Dorofeev: “It shows how to stop forgetting about various small tasks, save nerves and concentration (thereby getting less tired), make better decisions and achieve goals that you always wanted to achieve, but how- it’s not enough time. ” + “Write, shorten” Ilyakhov and Sarycheva: “About writing interesting and useful texts with care for the reader.”
-bevalorous - “Antifragility” by Nassim Taleb: “It allows you to see in a whole new way how to properly manage any risks and how living / developing systems differ from dead / stagnant ones. Plus a bunch of very interesting facts and reasoning along the way. ”
- kovyilin advises a bunch of everything.
- darthslider - “A Word About Words” by Leo Uspensky: “Very entertaining. They [books] are very stylistically oriented towards children, but adults are also very interested. ”
- zzzmmtt - Robert Kiyosaki: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and “Cash Flow Quadrant” - “It helps to understand the principles of money flow, the principles of enrichment, and it can also motivate someone to change their life radically.”
-8_gramm - “Living as Life” by Korney Chukovsky: “It turned out that he is not only the author of children's books, but also an excellent translator and writer of books for translators ... about the development of the language, about different borrowings and changes in words. It is very easy to read. A lot of irony in the text. And how he walks around the stationery, it’s a pleasure to watch. ”
- brom_portret is a list .
- aRomanyuk advises another list .
- prudnitskiyDesmond Morris's “Naked Monkey” - “It's amazingly funny to see how the most complex features of human behavior and motivation are based on our animal instinctive past. You begin to look differently at the "crown of creation." + “The Biology of Good and Evil” (Behave: Biology of humans at our best and worst) by Robert Sapolsky.
- DS28 - “Russian with a Dictionary” by Irina Levontina, - “I entered the short list of the Enlightener Prize.”
- CryptoPirate - “12 Rules for Life,” Jordan Peterson: “Peterson has a very interesting and orderly argument with examples from his practice (he is a psychiatrist and professor at the university) and life.”