VM’s Bookshelf
Here are a few of my favorite things
It might sound weird, but my most favorite genre is nonfiction. One of my most favorite things to do as a kid was reading about things that interested me, either through online encyclopedias or reference books at my local libraries. Over time, I’ve collected open-access books, explorable explanations, other websites, and various nonfiction books on a wide range of topics.
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Open Educational Resources
As someone who loves learning on their own, I’m really glad that open educational resources (OER) like the ones in this section exist. It’s like the “open source” of the book publishing world! In some cases, the authors of these “books” provide the source code used to make them, so you can peer behind the curtain to see the publishing process. Some of these are made by enthusiasts who are passionate about the things they want to show their readers; in other cases, you literally get what you (don’t) pay for. Here are some of my favorite OER books that I’ve found searching the web, as well as some that I’ve used during college.
"An Introduction to Statistical Learning" (x2)
- Use this pair of books to learn machine learning
- Author(s): Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Jonathan Taylor
- Publish Date: 2023-07-01
If I taught any college-level course on machine learning, I would choose these books as part of the curriculum. I think they explain ML topics really well thanks to their code samples and real-world examples. The R version is on its second edition, and Python version's first edition was recently released. I think either one is a good choice to start with when learning ML.
"Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book About Math"
- Author(s): Alex Berke, foreword by Alex Bellos
- Publish Date: 2020-02-18
This online book contains interactive animations for the corresponding physical book. It's a good introduction to symmetry groups and frieze groups in group theory. Clicking on the different images in the book plays helpful dynamic animations.
"How to Design Programs" (2nd Ed.)
- Introductory CS textbook written in an educational programming language
- Author(s): Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi
- Publish Date: 2014-08-01
This was the textbook for my introductory programming class for computer science majors. This book taught me functional programming, recursion, and data structures using Racket, a dialect of the Lisp programming language. I find it neat that the book itself is programmed in Racket using the pollen library. Based on the complaints & memes that I've seen from other students, I don't think anyone in my class liked Racket because of how useless niche it was. I think the book itself does a good job of teaching students Racket and programming fundamentals, though.
"Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems"
- Author(s): Hiroki Sayama
- Publish Date: 2015-08-13
Sayama's textbook helped me understand how dynamical systems work for my master's thesis.
"Learning APL"
- Digestible APL explanations you can really sink your teeth into
- Author(s): Stefan Kruger
- Publish Date: 2023
Kruger's online collection of Jupyter notebooks is a really well-written unofficial guide to Dyalog APL, targeting readers who already know how to program but want to experience a modern spin on one of the oldest programming languages. I like its informal tone; it intertwines quips, memes, and comics with lessons in Iversonian language concepts.
"Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers"
- Better than the textbook I used in my Diff EQ's class
- Author(s): Jiří Lebl
- Publish Date: 2023-10-26
I struggled a lot with differential equations in college; Lebl's explanations made a lot more sense to me than the textbook that I used in my differential equations class.
"Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning"
- Learning machine learning has never been so painful
- Author(s): Christopher M. Bishop
- Publish Date: 2006-08-17
I do not recommend this textbook for anyone wanting to learn ML. Read at your own risk.
This was the textbook for my graduate machine learning course. For some reason it's a popular choice for machine learning classes; hence, it still deserves a place in my collection. This book is over fifteen years old; its corresponding website no longer exists thanks to link rot. It contains neither code samples nor real-world examples for implementing ML algorithms. Bishop throws standard probability theory notation out the window and grotesquely flexes his mathematical muscles instead of helping the reader understand machine learning concepts.
"Paul's Online Notes"
- Got me through high school & college math classes
- Author(s): Paul Dawkins
- Publish Date: 2003
This was my go-to resource for understanding how to solve some of my college-level math problems step-by-step since high school. I'm pretty sure I should reach out to Prof. Dawkins himself and personally thank him for his work.
"decidables: Explorable Explanations of Decision Making"
- Interactive intro to decision making concepts
- Author(s): Adam Krawitz
- Publish Date: N/A
My estimation & detection theory professor shared an explorable explanation from this website with us at the end of the class. As of writing this section, only the first draft of d'etectable is out; it explains signal detection theory from a statistical perspective.
Other Free Online Books
Here are some other online books that I found online. These are not necessarily educational, but they are still interesting to flip through.
"The Final War"
- Written & illustrated by a child, found next to stats books
- Author(s): Beckett Stephens
- Publish Date: 2018-02-19
I found this book by accident scrolling through the tags of the Bookdown website. It reminds me of the books I made in elementary school for class projects. I'm looking forward to reading the first and third installments if they are ever published online.
"The Jargon File" / "The New Hacker's Dictionary"
- A useful guide for understanding the hackers of yesteryear
- Author(s): Eric S. Raymond, Guy L. Steele, Jr.
- Publish Date: 2004-10-01
This text document provides a glossary of hacker culture terms and provides snapshots of the lives of nerds from 1975 to 2003. It's a good source to find the etymology of words like "foobar" or "kludge".
Old Books I Own
I’ve started to slowly collect books (primarily textbooks) from used bookstores about math and engineering. My favorite parts of them are their diagrams, figures, tables, and equations. While the information in these books should hopefully still be mathematically sound today, I obviously recommend finding a more recent book for more updated definitions and explanations.
Unless otherwise specified, the links in this section will take you to these books’ corresponding entries on the Internet Archive. You can “check out” these books electronically through the IA for a short time if you make an account there.
"Brief Course in Analytics" (1st Ed.)
- No, not that type of analytics
- Author(s): M. A. Hill, Jr. and J. B. Linker
- Publish Date: 1940
I found this book at a used bookstore while on vacation in Fall 2023. I'm fairly certain this is the oldest book I own, so I try to handle it carefully. This book isn't about the modern definition of analytics; it's actually about analytic geometry, the study of geometry through the coordinate plane. Its chapters outline basic concepts like line equations, trigonometric functions, conic sections, coordinate systems, and 3D surfaces.
I know a couple of details about my copy's original owner based on what he left behind in the book. He wrote his name and address in cursive on the front pages, scrawled notes in margins, and left a folded homework sheet containing a hand-drawn 3D graph wedged in between the pages.
"Foundations of Optimization"
- Author(s): Douglass J. Wilde, Charles S. Beightler
- Publish Date: 1967
I found this book at an outdoor flea market in Summer 2023. The vendor told me it belonged to an old tech company that was dissolved, and one of the higher-ups pawned off some of the textbooks on to him.
This book touts itself as "the first comprehensive and unified treatment of modern optimization theory". While I don't know whether that claim is true, the book contains tons of mathematical optimization techniques including linear programming, Lagrange multipliers, search algorithms, graph theory concepts, and dynamic programming methods. What fascinates me about this book is that it predates personal computers; a lot of the optimization methods that we would do on a computer today like dynamic programming are done by hand in this book with tables.
"Introduction to Operations Research", 5th Ed.
- Author(s): Frederick S. Hiller, Gerald J. Lieberman
- Publish Date: 1990
I noticed that this book was sitting in front of one of my workplace labs for about a week, so I snapped a picture of it and asked around if anyone lost it. It turned out the book's original owner happened to be a friend of mine, and told me I could keep the book since he didn't need it anymore.
I haven't read this book yet.
"Manual of Active Filter Design", 2nd Ed.
- Author(s): John L. Hilburn, David E. Johnson
- Publish Date: 1983
Someone at my workplace put out some old books for free, so I snagged this one. I haven't read it yet.
The IA only has a copy of the first edition to lend out.
"Nomadic Furniture" (Volumes 1 & 2)
- Author(s): James Hennessey, Victor Papanek
- Publish Date: 1973 (Vol. 1) and 1974 (Vol. 2), reprinted in 2008
These books gave me a hyperfixation in DIY modular furniture design as a high schooler, and for good reason. Each book contains guides and schematics for designing various types of furniture from tables and chairs to entire rooms that can easily be taken apart and moved around. I didn't notice that my dad's S-hook tension bookshelves come from Volume 2 until I gave him these books as a gift; it turned out that he had lost his original copies. I currently own the 2008 reprint of these books from Schiffer Publishing.