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This is FiveMinuteFriday on My Favorite Books
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At the end of every guest episode — so every odd-numbered episode — I ask the guest for a book recommendation. About half of the time, these are related to data science in some way; the other half of the time, they’re completely unrelated but nevertheless interesting topics, such as champagne, the hallucinogen cocktails dreamt up by medieval witches, and the biographies of great entrepreneurs. Given that SuperDataScience listeners love this question, I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you about some of my own all-time favorite books.
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As detailed in Episode #442, I’m a big fan of James Clear’s writing in general, particularly his #1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits. You can head back to episode #442 for a longer treatise on the Atomic Habits approach, but in a nutshell it’s that big, desired changes across all aspects of your life are somewhat counterintuitively most efficiently and effectively made by committing to small, measurable adjustments. In that episode, I detail examples of this with respect to data science skills.
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While I do love Atomic Habits and I recommend it a lot given it’s impactfulness, I don’t think I could say it’s my absolute favorite non-fiction work of all time. That distinction is reserved for Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. The content covered by Harari — anthropological, historical, scientific and philosophical, with occasional emphases on Buddhism and mindfulness — delved into countless topics that I reflect on day in and day out. His writing was clear, concise and playful, and the book left me feeling centred and optimistic about projections involving our species surrounding thigs like war, automation and biotechnological augmentation as well as the planet, so things like climate change, ecological destruction and gene editing. So prominent aspects of my consciousness have found troubling for years and I felt much better after reading Sapiens. I couldn’t shut up about the facts and ideas I distilled from the text as I read it to anyone around me who would listen.
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Recently, I picked up the first volume of the graphic that is the comic book-style version of Sapiens, which was released in late 2020, so it’s got this comic book style to it. So this is the first volume but I assume there are more to follow. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but expect that it’s awesome, particularly if you enjoy learning visually.
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Speaking of which, if you’re into learning visually, then I can’t help but mention my book Deep Learning Illustrated, which makes use of over a hundred hand-drawn illustrations, full-color mathematical equations, and hundreds of hands-on code demos to make learning the theory of artificial neural networks as easy and fun as possible.
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Now, I’m not here to plug my own book, I promise! Really, my book was simply a segue from illustration to another deep learning book and that’s Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville’s. So, this doesn’t have any code examples, but it’s the bible for getting deep into deep learning if you’d like to become completely immersed in understanding the underlying mathematics. The authors made the book available freely online, but because the math is inaccessible to many folks without an undergraduate degree in the field, I’ve been working away on my Machine Learning Foundations series of lectures and video tutorials, which details the linear algebra, calculus, probability theory, and computer science that you need to know to be able to tackle a book like Deep Learning — or any graduate-level machine learning textbook or academic paper. The series is available for free on YouTube or if you’d like to get detailed solution walkthroughs and other goodies like a certificate of completion, you can purchase the typically quite inexpensive Udemy version of the content, which I am publishing in partnership with SuperDataScience.
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Finally, all of the books that I just mentioned were works of nonfiction! I do enjoy getting absorbed in works of fiction as well and my favorite all-time is Cat’s Cradle by the satirical American author Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt’s books are typically found in the science fiction section of bookstores, but I think this is a misclassification from my perspective. He invokes science-fictional concepts only to convey deep philosophical insights and he manages to do so with buckets full of dry humor; I love both of these aspects of his writing. While Vonnegut has tons of marvellous books, I’d say start with Cat’s Cradle if you’d like to try his writing style out yourself as that particular book contains philosophies that have shaped my life, time and time again.
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All right, I could go on all day but am going to stop there in the interest of keeping Five-Minute Friday to around five minutes. You can head to jonkrohn.com/bookreviews for many more three-sentence summaries of books I’ve read in recent years. For now, keep on rockin’ it out there and catch you on another episode of the SuperDataScience podcast soon.
