Infrastructure
Covering agriculture, resources, energy, communication, transportation, manufacturing, and waste, this is the "Book of Everything" for the industrial landscape. The objects that fill our everyday environment are streetlights, railroad tracks, antenna towers, highway overpasses, power lines, satellite dishes, and thousands of other manufactured items, many of them so familiar we hardly notice them. Larger and more exotic facilities have transformed vast tracts of the landscape: coal mines, nuclear power plants, grain elevators, oil refineries, and steel mills, to name a few.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
9mentions
8people
2009–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'd recommend Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes http://industrial-landscape.com/
It covers everything from railroad tracks, antenna towers, highway overpasses, power lines, grain elevators, oil refineries, steel mills, and more… Lots of great pictures and detailed explanations.
And I also bought "Open Circuits" and find it to be both beautiful and illuminating.
- The book Infrastructure, by Brian Hayes, seems similar to your description of Vaclav Smil's book. It's a big book filled with photos and explanations of various infrastructure (mines, factories, railroads, the electrical grid, waterworks and so on) that we keep seeing but don't quite understand what we see. It shows how much it really takes to keep the modern world functioning.
- You might enjoy "Infrastructure: a guide to the industrial landscape" by Brian Hayes in the meantime.
- Thanks for the recommendation. For a more modern take, the chapter on "The Power Grid" in Brian Hayes' "Infrastructure" is tremendous as well: http://industrial-landscape.com
- If you this blog you might also enjoy the book that the author published a few years ago, "Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393349837).
- A good book on this and related subjects is Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes. Published in 2006 so almost certainly out of print, but probably easy enough to get on Amazon or similar.
Related
Programming from the Ground Up
36 recommend · 56
Pro Git
142 recommend · 173
Computer Networks
50 recommend · 110
Traction
66 recommend · 105
Getting Things Done
116 recommend · 237
Systems Performance
32 recommend · 53
Linkers and loaders
29 recommend · 45
