Less Dorky Poll: Business Reading

As a sort of companion to the previous post:

What's the last book you read because it connected to your job in some way?

I'm being a little more restrictive in the phrasing of this one, because I don't want to get a whole bunch of journal articles and arxiv links in the comments, so let's keep this to published books.

I've been doing more work-related reading of late, for a variety of reasons. Why the Sky Is Blue was work-related, in the sense that I was sent a review copy because of this blog. My other recent work-related read was Jennifer Ouellette's Black Bodies and Quantum Cats, which I read in large part because she visited Union last week to give us a couple of really excellent talks, despite the fact that she was getting over a cold, and had almost totally lost her voice.

It's important to note that just because I read it due to a work connection doesn't mean that the book was work to read. On the contrary, it was a good deal of fun-- she runs through many of the best anecdotes in the history of physics, and provides engaging descriptions of the science and the people involved. She also finds an amazing variety of connections between historical events in physics and more recent pop culture, which adds to the fun.

So, what's the last book you read as part of your job?

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This is a tough question, because I'm usually reading 4 or 5 work-books simultaneously, but the ones getting the most nightstand time lately have been "The Theory of Almost Everything" by Robert Oerter and "Albert Einstein", the 700+ page scholarly biography by Albrect Fölsing, not to be confused with the new mass-market bio currently all over the bookstores.

Both are assigned student reading that I also have to read.

I don't tend to read many actual books for work. Journal articles, yes, but books, no. And the books I use aren't generally meant for reading, they're meant for referencing.

All that said, probably Will Egan's excellent series on PLLs, Frequency Synthesizers and RF Systems.

Problem is, in my field, there's just so many damn fiddly bits that it's pretty much impossible to write it all down. Just in the narrow field of frequency synthesis, that three book series is excellent, probably the best I've ever seen. And yet, there's a critical piece of information missing without which, I guarantee you, if you try to design something for use on an aircraft, you will fail to meet a critical spec. (One does not use piezoelectric devices on vibrating platforms without considering the effects thereof.)

My field is littered with stuff like that.

So books, not so much. Journals, white papers, etc, yes.

By John Novak (not verified) on 01 Jun 2007 #permalink

Being a science librarian, I read both library and science related stuff for work. Most recently that's The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin and Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change by Walt Crawford (published via Lulu). Both are great books. Currently it's The Science of Evolution and The Myth of Creationism by Ardea Skybreak and Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

Der die Sterne liebte: Georg von Peuerbach und seine Zeit as I am holding a public lecture on Regiomontanus today in two weeks and Peuerbach was his teacher.

Multi-Core Programming: Increasing Performance through Software Multi-threading.

Software developers can no longer rely on increasing clock speeds alone to speed up single-threaded applications... developers must learn how to properly design their applications to run in a threaded environment.

Most of my job-related reading consists of reference manuals, headers files, and old newsgroup threads. It's a pleasant change to find up to date material in a well written book.