It is surprising that lots of people(including me) learn about this book only now[1]. Have you read any other book like 'Calculus Made Easy'? Please mention in comments. Not only in maths. It could be in any subject or field. I think it will be helpful to many.<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14161876
If you want to know about how computers work, I would recommend books written by Anthony Dos Reis[0]. I could say that all of his books were very easy to read and follow. I learned tons of stuffs from his books like assembly language, computer architecture, writing an assembler, creating a CPU simulator, know how compilers generate machine instructions, know what are grammars, formal languages and learned how to build a programming language, write a recursive descent parser, incrementally improving a compiler, implement grep after learning automata theory and a lot _more_ cool stuffs from his books. Those books were the reason why I got hooked with computer science. I just got his new book about abstract algebra which had been released last month. There's a lot of gems on it and I'm still reading it mostly it could take me months to finish reading but it really had gave me quality time grokking the concepts. I never meet this man but I owe so much from him and hope there would be more books that he could write like about operating systems.<p>[0] - <a href="http://cs.newpaltz.edu/~dosreist/" rel="nofollow">http://cs.newpaltz.edu/~dosreist/</a>
If you go through that one, give Calculus by Spivak a try. Interesting book and starts off with a bit more of the fundamentals.<p>How to solve it by Polya - an awesome book. Read these to learn not just mathematical problem solving but in general. I don't think I've read a book quite like this before. The idea of a process and tools for problem solving is awesome.<p>How to prove it - a great book. I felt after reading through this I had a much better understanding of how proof works. I also had a better understanding of how mathematicians go from scratch work and proof to the proofs they finally present. There's a lot more that goes behind them and will help you understand those proofs by giving you the tools to do the scratch work behind them yourself. I had tried to learn proof techniques from a few other sources, including Jeremy Kun's awesome primers.<p>"Conceptual mathematics" - did a very good job in helping me make more progress with category theory. I tried a few different books and an online series. Flicking between those and this book, I started to understand much better.<p>The Little Schemer - the one that finally opened the key to recursion, closures and functional programming. I had tried attacking this using a few other books, including SICP but TLS helped a tonne in the final clicking.<p>Thinking in Type - great book that taught me quite a bit about typography. It showed me how important typography is to design.<p>You can draw in 30 days - sounds very SAMS but actually the progress I made in 1 day is testimony to the book's bold claim. You won't be Da Vinci but you will have functional drawing and sketching skills if you go through this.<p>It's important to note my process in finding these books. I think much of the groundwork and mental priming before working through most of the above helped a lot.<p>A tend to get interested in a topic and then seek out good books in that field. If the book doesn't make much sense or is very dense, I keep at it for a day or so. I then seek out similar books and repeat the process until a little jump forward.<p>Unfortunately in around 1 to 2 weeks, I've lost interest and I repeat the same thing on a different topic.<p>I probably have a tonne more but they're spread across many subjects so it's difficult to consolidate. Feel free to email me if you want recommendations for a particular subject.
I think But How Do It Know?[0] is a good read. It takes a similarly straightforward and light-hearted first principles approach to computer systems organization. Highly recommend.<p>[0] - <a href="http://www.buthowdoitknow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.buthowdoitknow.com/</a>
An oldie but a goody for a curious mind needing a base for learning electronics. The handwritten text & drawings made the task of learning seem <i>slightly</i> less daunting, IME. That was 30 years ago, and yet I still see the smiling electrons in my mind`s eye when problem-solving transmission issues on-board and on the network.<p><a href="http://www.forrestmims.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forrestmims.com/</a>
It's kind of outdated now. But Mastering EJB (2nd edition) by Ed Roman was very helpful to me to understand EJB at one point. The writing was very different from a typical technical book. It was like reading a novel.
The one that immediately springs to mind is "Mathematics For The Million" by Lancelot Hogben. I really enjoyed it because it places mathematical developments in their historical context.