Today in the post about mid-level backend engineering courses, someone offered "just buy this book" (Designing Data-Intensive Applications) and other commenters echoed support for the book. A few weeks ago in a thread about ML someone commented to the effect of "Everything you need to know in ML is in this book" (Deep Learning with Python) and again people chimed in supporting it. Maybe those two examples are actually off base, but I love the idea of the "one book" where you can get a decently complete picture of a given subject and level of expertise. So HN, what's your discipline and "one book"?
The bible of machinists everywhere is Machinery's Handbook[1]<p>I've got an old copy, but they tend to remain useful for generations, as the basics really don't change very often. When you've got to make a bevel gear, and all you have is involute cutters, they've got the formula and details to get an acceptable one-off.<p>If you're cutting an ACME thread, they've got it covered, etc.<p>If you want to see for yourself, you can borrow a copy from the Internet Archive[2]<p>[1] <a href="https://books.industrialpress.com/machinery-handbook/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://books.industrialpress.com/machinery-handbook/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://archive.org/search?query=+Machinery%27s+Handbook" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.org/search?query=+Machinery%27s+Handbook</a>
Frontend dev, and the others I've met seem to just read a few pages on MDN and Stack and wing it from there, lol. I wish there was a good book on the engineering side of it. The UX side of it has a few good titles, but the dev side is pretty messy.
Chocolates & Confections by Peter P. Greweling. It's full of recipes, but more importantly there are large sections of information about how the cooking process actually works, how each ingredient effects the end result, why things like excess humidity can cause things to not set, etc.
I'm a marketer, although there are a lot of "must-haves", I'd say the one I keep coming back to is "The Ultimate Sales Machine" by Chet Holmes<p>For those interested in other books for marketing, I compiled a list here (most even have book summaries already for convenience):
<a href="https://share.justbeepit.com/screenshot/647f77b9b37c520014258391?hashtag=books" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://share.justbeepit.com/screenshot/647f77b9b37c52001425...</a>
I don't think I could ever pick a single book, but Clean Architecture by Robert Martin is a favorite of mine. Really helped shape the design of testable systems for me. Once I actually started writing automated tests for my code, it turns out things broke in production a lot less, who would have thought? I don't like what is probably his most popular book, Clean Code, though.
Factory Physics - Hopp, Spearman<p>Great book on manufacturing operations management that I consider to be one of the best technical books on the subject.