Favorite Books

I’m obsessed with books! Okay, that’s probably an understatement. Perhaps this will help prove my point. Some fellow bibliophiles might relate to my slightly unusual habit of spending ten or twenty minutes just studying the contents of a bookshelf. I’ll even take pictures so I can look up the titles later. I simply can’t help myself. Whenever I encounter a bookshelf overflowing with books, I feel an almost gravitational pull toward it, as though every cover exerts its own little force of attraction.

But I believe this fascination goes far beyond simply seeking novelty. At my core, I’m insatiably curious. My mind is constantly generating questions, practically minute by minute. Every book represents another opportunity to explore an unfamiliar idea, challenge what I think I know, or discover something I hadn’t even thought to question.

A bookshelf I built to hold a small subset of my book collection — Figure 1: My homemade bookshelf, built to house an ever-growing collection of books.

I became a voracious reader around the age of twelve, although my curiosity began long before that. Even in my earliest years, I couldn’t stop asking why. I recall one particularly amusing, yet humbling, moment during a Sunday school class at church when I asked, “If God is our Father, then who is His father?”

I wanted to understand the origins of God. What was His nature? What does it mean to be dead? What is the purpose of our existence? And perhaps most importantly, how could we possibly know the answers to any of these questions?

I was rarely satisfied with the answers I received from my teachers or scripture. While some provided useful moral constructs for navigating the complexities of human existence, they did little to satisfy my deeper questions about the nature of reality. So I began looking elsewhere, turning to more secular books on evolution, philosophy, psychology, and just about anything else that might offer another piece of the puzzle.

None of this is meant to disparage religion. Even today, I appreciate aspects of religion as a framework for moral reasoning, provided one’s interpretation doesn’t come at the expense of scientific inquiry or infringe upon the rights and freedoms of others. My point is simply that faith and curiosity need not be mutually exclusive. After all, some of history’s greatest religious thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, devoted their lives to questioning the nature of God, existence, and reality itself. Aquinas understood that asking difficult questions wasn’t necessarily an abandonment of faith, but could instead be a means of deepening one’s understanding of it. Whether religious or not, I believe we should never stop questioning the things we think we know.

In fact, that’s something I appreciated about growing up Mormon: the encouragement, at least in my experience, to ask questions and seek answers for myself. Although I no longer consider myself religious, I still value that early encouragement to seek understanding. Today, I lean on the scientific method as my primary means of investigating the world, grounding my beliefs in evidence, reason, and a willingness to revise them when new information comes to light. Of course, science doesn’t necessarily answer every philosophical question about existence, meaning, or morality, but it provides a powerful framework for distinguishing what we know from what we merely believe. Looking back, I think that early desire to understand the world, rather than simply accept it as it was presented to me, helped shape the insatiable curiosity I still carry today.

And perhaps that brings me back to my obsession with books. I probably buy more than I’ll ever have time to finish, but that’s a problem I’m perfectly happy to live with, although I’m starting to run out of shelf and floor space. Below are some of my favorite books—some that have shaped how I think, work, and build, and others that have simply satisfied my curiosity, a seemingly bottomless ocean whose depths I’ve barely begun to explore.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Data Science

The Master Algorithm

Pedro Domingos

LLMs in Production

Christopher Brousseau & Matt Sharp

Introduction to Data Mining

Pang-Ning Tan, Michael Steinbach, Vipin Kumar

Design and Analysis of Experiments

Douglas C. Montgomery

Software Engineering & Computer Science

The Pragmatic Programmer

David Thomas & Andrew Hunt

This one is a classic! I picked this up about 1-2 years into my career and found it to be a great resource for developing into a better software engineer.

The Secret Life of Programs

Jonathan E. Steinhart

****

Code

Charles Petzold

****

Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective

Randal E. Bryant & David R. O’Hallaron

****

Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible

Richard Blum & Christine Bresnahan

****

The C Programming Language

Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie

Grokking Algorithms

Aditya Y. Bhargava

Systems Architecture, Cloud & DevOps

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann

I started reading this book when I wanted to dive deeper into the world of big data several years ago. Kleppmann does a fantastic job explaining complex data systems in a practical and understandable way. It helped me see how databases, distributed systems, pipelines, and system architecture fit together. I especially appreciated how the book compares different design choices and explains the tradeoffs behind them, rather than simply describing them. Now that I’ve had several years of experience building data systems, I can better appreciate the insights and real-world applications presented in the book.

The DevOps Handbook

Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis & Nicole Forsgren

****

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford

****

Solutions Architect’s Handbook

Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav, Kamal Arora

Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide

Dan Sullivan

Web Scalability for Startup Engineers

Artur Ejsmont

Engineering, Architecture & Design

Understanding Architecture

Leland M. Roth & Amanda C. Roth Clark

Architecture: Form, Space, and Order

Engineering in Plain Sight

Grady Hillhouse

Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down

James Edward Gordon

Engineering Mechanics: Statics

R. C. Hibbeler

How Stuff Works

Marshall Brain, HowStuffWorks.com

A Biography of the Pixel

Alvy Ray Smith

The Color Bible

Laura Perryman

Psychology, Decision-Making & Personal Growth

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

I enjoyed this book because it helped me better understand how people make decisions and how easily our thinking can be influenced by biases. I found the contrast between fast, intuitive thinking and slow, deliberate thinking especially useful. The book made me reflect more carefully on my own judgments and decision-making habits.