Hi, welcome to the brand new website, HN Reads. I enjoy reading Hacker News and I love buying books (and reading), and I also love data, so what better than doing some processing of data about books to find some interesting results?! It also gives me the opportunity to write about books that I find interesting. Here are the top 40 books recommended by HN readers in 2023. How I generated this list:

I came across this list and thought it might be interesting to the programming community here.

Which of these books have you read, or are on your list? Did any have a profound impact on your life? Were any a struggle to get through?

  • spacedogroyEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    I’ve been reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications and it really is a great book, specifically for backend engineers.

    • bugsmith@programming.devOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      That one has been on my list for a while. Are you finding yourself able to easily apply what is taught to your day-to-day?

      • spacedogroyEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        A lot of it has reinforced my understanding around distributed databases and transactions. In my day-to-day, I’ve not really had need to use this knowledge as pretty much all our data stores are hosted in cloud platforms and we’re operating on low datasets and traffic.