The adventures of sherlock holmes

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1. rramadassSep 2025
   Sherlock Holmes said it best :-)

   “Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.

   -- From "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

   Every kid should be given a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes canon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes) This will turn them towards learning and practicing "The Art of Deduction (or Ratiocination according to Edgar Allan Poe)" like nothing else and will directly lead to them understanding the importance of Logic and Science/Mathematics in today's world.

   For example, as a kid growing up in 80s India, i read whatever i could get my hands on (eg. Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton, Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth etc. etc.) but none of them really made a mark. Then somebody gave me a copy of "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes" and i was zapped. Here was somebody who focused on reasoning and showed you the steps involved. Of course once you grew-up you realized that much of the "Deductions" were far-fetched/implausible but nevertheless the fire was lit. It directly led to my interest in Science/Mathematics and then a career in Software (much of Holmes' methods are directly applicable to Debugging).

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2. anthkJan 2023
   Get into books. No, not computer related books. Narrative. Sherlock Holmes' books are now under Public Domain. Get all of them, and try reading them in chronologcal in order.

       A Study in Scarlet
   
       The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 
   
       The Sign of Four
   
       The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
   
       The Valley of Fear
   
       The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
   
       The Return of Sherlock Holmes
   
       His Last Bow
   
       The Hound of the Baskervilles
   

   If you are a sysadmin, network engineer with vulnscanning experience, IT forensics expert or a reverse engineer, you might feel at home, because deductive reasoning it's right here.
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3. AndrewStephensJul 2022
   It is a nice little project but if anyone actually wants pre-made audio versions of out-of-copyright books then I suggest looking at LibriVox[0]

   They have thousands of works read by volunteers (some are very good, some average) and they publish RSS feeds for collections so you can consume them with your podcast app.

   For example, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes[1], a dramatic reading.

   [0] https://librivox.org

   [1] https://librivox.org/the-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes-versi...

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4. brikis98Jul 2016
   1. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Arthur Conan Doyle.

   This may sound like an odd one, but years ago, I almost never took the time to read. My girlfriend, who knew that I loved Sherlock Holmes books when I was younger, convinced me to try this book as an audiobook while I did my ~40 minute commute to work. I was skeptical, but within days, I was hooked. It made my work commute much more interesting (a British person was reading me Sherlock Holmes!); then I started listening to audiobooks during all my driving (instead of wasting time, I can learn!); then I got an iPod, put audiobooks on that, and started listening to them during all sorts of odd chores (e.g. cleaning, walking, biking); after that, I was so hooked on books, that I started making time to read them too. This had a profoundly transformative effect on my career.

   2. "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries.

   I got a copy of this book when I went to a talk by Eric Ries. Eric seemed like a humble, down-to-earth person and helped dispel the notion that to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be a prescient, superhero, god-like visionary. Instead, what you need to do is to treat your startup and product ideas as hypotheses and test them, as quickly and cheaply as you can (i.e. lean development, MVPs, etc). This fit very well with what I had seen in the real world and with how I thought about problem solving as a software engineer, and gave me a lot of confidence to try out many of my ideas. Since then, I've used these ideas to start a company (http://www.gruntwork.io/) and written quite a bit on what I learned, including an article on The Macro about MVPs (http://themacro.com/articles/2016/01/minimum-viable-product-...).

   3. "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.

   If Conan Doyle taught me about the fun of reading, then William Zinsser taught me about the fun of writing. If you want to learn how to write, what it's like to write, or why you should write ("Writing is not a special language owned by the English teacher. Writing is thinking on paper."), it's hard to find a better guide. This book significantly improved my writing skills and even gave me the confidence to write a book (http://www.hello-startup.net/).

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5. tagawaDec 2012
   Oh, it has to be Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky). Blew me away. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554

   For lighter reading, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661

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6. shawndumasDec 2010
   89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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