Thermodynamics

What Hacker News says

1. evanbJul 2017
   I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

   CULTURAL

   Einstein - Essays in Humanism

   Frayn - Copenhagen

   Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

   Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

   de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

   Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

   Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

   Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

   Macaulay - The Way Things Work

   Paulos - Innumeracy

   Sagan - Cosmos

   Sagan - Broca's Brain

   Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

   Salam - Science in the Third World

   Seife - Zero

   Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

   POPULAR

   Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)

   Feynman - The Meaning of It All

   Feynman - Lectures on Physics

   Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

   Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

   Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

   Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

   Hawking - A Brief History of Time

   Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

   Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

   Polya - How to Solve It

   Schrödinger - What is Life?

   Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

   Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

   Wallace - Everything And More

   Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

   Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

   TEXTS

   Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )

   Abelson and Sussman - SICP

   Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics

   Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

   Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

   Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

   Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

   Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

   Fermi - Thermodynamics

   Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

   Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

   Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

   Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

   Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)

   Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

   Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

   Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

   Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

   Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

   Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

   Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

   Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)

   Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

   Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

   Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

   Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

   Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

   Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

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2. pkruminsApr 2015
   Post author here - I've been collecting and researching science, math, physics, programming books since 2001 or 2002, so that is close to 15 years of book research. I'm really passionate about high quality books. I carefully evaluate every book that I'm about to buy, seek reviews, online previews and opinions. Then I make the purchase.

   I did a degree in physics just for fun so I went through many math and physics books, but I'm really most passionate about computers, software development and programming so most of my recommendations are going to be on that.

   I don't claim to have read every single book from cover to cover and worked through every problem but I can make educated recommendations, and I've gone through every book that I recommend. I've spent unreasonable amount of time looking for new books that are not top cited. Some of my recommendations will be top cited books but many won't be. Top cited books get my attention but they're not always good.

   Talking about dragon book I'm probably not going to recommend it. It's not fun. You can't get things done with it in any reasonable amount of time. I've actually been thinking of writing my own book on compilers where you get things done quicker with less theory and it's fun. The problem with dragon book is that people recommend it just because they've heard of it. Hardly anyone has actually read it.

   For the math books I'm not going to recommend standard text books much. My recommendations are going to be books such as Counterexamples in Topology, Counterexamples in Analysis. Those are super fun books to work through as counterexamples warp your mind a little bit, and you get that tiny adrenaline rush when you get it. Another example is To Mock a Mockingbird. It's not a text book, it's not a top cited book, but it's so fun. Another example Street-Fighting Mathematics.

   For the physics books I'm also not going to recommend too many standard text books. I also won't recommend popular science books as they're mostly stupid and won't stretch your mind a little bit. They may blow your mind a little bit but they won't stretch your mind. Example physics book recommendations include Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi, just beautiful explanations of the most the basic thermodynamic concepts. Another example is Quantum Paradoxes by Yakir Aharonov and Daniel Rohlich. I'll stop here as it's too many spoiler alerts. :)

   Let's take a look at the books that I recommended in the first post.

   1. The New Turing Omnibus - I read this book cover to cover in one evening. It's such a fun read and introduced so many concepts. I enjoyed one of the chapters about Busy Beaver Problem so much that I spent a few days implementing Busy Beaver in several languages and wrote a program that visualizes how the Beaver travels on the tape: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/busy-beaver/

   2. The Little Book of Semaphores - I read this book back in 2002 or 2003 when it was just released in the 1st edition. I printed it for easier reading. I've a huge stack of printed pdf books and scientific papers (I just snapped some pics http://i.imgur.com/bjPgxMD.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/QJFumGl.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/FD2dx3L.jpg) and I just found the 1st editon of semaphores in my printed pdf stack (http://i.imgur.com/qe9hgHM.jpg). I worked through most of the problems.

   3. Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls - I just love the way Jon Bentley writes. I don't know what else to say. These two books really teach the basics of solving programming problems. It takes many years to master the basics in practice but these books teach the basics well. I once wrote a blog post (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/three-beautiful-quicksorts/) about Jon Bentley's chapter in Beautiful Code that he based on a chapter on quick sort in Programming Pearls.

   4. The Little Schemer - I've gone through this book at least 5 times. Check out this photo that I just took of all the notes that I've made while reading it and the Seasoned/Reasoned Schemers (http://i.imgur.com/aeLEQh8.jpg). That is a lot of hours spent with these books. I enjoyed this book a lot and I copied out all the fun code examples and put them on GitHub (https://github.com/pkrumins/the-little-schemer), and I also wrote a blog post about deriving y-combinator based on one of the chapters in this book http://www.catonmat.net/blog/derivation-of-ycombinator/.

   5a. The Elements of Style - I first heard about this book in 2006 or so when I got serious about becoming a great writer, started blogging and wanted to improve my communication skills. It's the most cited book and I gave in and bought it. It's really good because you can read it in a few hours and learn a lot. I follow many of the rules and guidelines in this book. I'm also going to recommend On Writing Well. Spoilers.

   5b. The Elements of Programming Style - The Elements of Style + Brian Kernighan.

   I wouldn't recommend a book that I don't trust is really well written. That just wouldn't be me. I stand behind my recommendations.

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3. phugoidJun 2009
   Couldn't agree more.

   Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi is a little jewel.

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4. billfruitMar 2019
   The Soviets did have the Landau book for physics, though I do not know if it was made available in India.

   I should put a word for an Indian publishing house named Narosa which put out cheap editions of text books(mostly western) like the Feynman Lectures, Fermi's Thermodynamics, etc.

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