/reading

Books I finished or seriously poked at, with one-line takes. I don't review books in long form because almost nobody's mind is changed by a 1,500-word essay about a book; one line is closer to honest.

Currently: Kleppmann (3rd re-read) · "The Three-Body Problem" · the LWN backlog.

2026 — so far

aprThe Linux Programming Interface — Kerrisk. Re-reading the IPC chapters. Still the reference.
marSystems Performance, 2e — Brendan Gregg. The USE method alone earns the price.
febWorking in Public — Nadia Eghbal. Recommended to me twice; finally bit. Worth it.
janDesigning Data-Intensive Applications — Kleppmann, 3rd pass. The consistency chapter never stops giving.

2025

decAntifragile — Taleb. Made my eyes roll. Made me think. Both can be true.
novBPF Performance Tools — Gregg again. Cover to cover. Took notes.
sepUnderstanding the Linux Kernel — Bovet & Cesati. Outdated in detail, still right in structure.
augThe Sense of Style — Pinker. Recommended to me by an editor friend. I write differently now, marginally.
julDatabase Internals — Petrov. Pairs well with Kleppmann; thinner, sharper.
junProject Hail Mary — Weir. The science is silly. The pacing is not.
mayThe Practice of System and Network Administration — too long, but the on-call chapters are required reading.
marWriting Solid Code — Maguire. From 1993. Aged better than most of what we publish now.
febAtomic Habits — Clear. Read on a flight. I do not have notes.
janProgramming Pearls — Bentley. Re-read every few years. Still pearls.

Older — the keepers

A short list of the books I'd actually re-buy if a fire ate my shelf.

  • The C Programming Language — K&R. Still the cleanest tech book in print.
  • The Elements of Programming Style — Kernighan & Plauger. Most of the rules survived.
  • Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit — Takada (it's a website, I'm counting it).
  • The Annotated Turing — Petzold. The math is hard. The annotation is gentle.
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People — Carnegie. Yes, really. Yes, ironic. Yes, useful.

Abandoned, no regrets

  • The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th anniversary. I read the first edition when it was new. The new one didn't move me.
  • Clean Code. Reasonable people disagree on this. I'm one of them.
  • SICP, again. I keep starting. I keep stopping at chapter 3. Maybe next year.
  • Almost every business book in airport bookshops. Sorry.

See also: /now (what I'm reading right now) · /til (things I learned, often from these).

Last edited: this month — added the April line.