Julia Evans

Julia Evans

programming and exclamation marks. she/her. zines at https://t.co/Rl14X28NuU. also on Mastodon at https://t.co/hGkpEE38OW, or @b0rk@jvns.ca

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10+ Book Recommendations by Julia Evans

  • In this book, Michael Feathers offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases. This book draws on material Michael created for his own renowned Object Mentor seminars: techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control. This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.

    @commanda that book is so good, I only read part of it but it really stuck with me

  • From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a bracingly original approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society--and in ourselves. "The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it--and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society. Advance praise for How to Be an Antiracist "This latest from the National Book Award-winning author is no guidebook to getting woke. . . . Rather, it is a combination of memoir and extension of . . . Kendi's towering Stamped From the Beginning that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. . . . Never wavering . . . Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth. . . . If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he's just as hard on himself. . . . This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory. Not an easy read but an essential one."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Ibram Kendi is today's visionary in the enduring struggle for racial justice. In this personal and revelatory new work, he yet again holds up a transformative lens, challenging both mainstream and antiracist orthodoxy. He illuminates the foundations of racism in revolutionary new ways, and I am consistently challenged and inspired by his analysis. How to Be an Antiracist offers us a necessary and critical way forward."--Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility

    @BentTerp i think the book is really worth reading but here's the start of his discussion of standardized testing https://t.co/IeaBTWw1Vb

  • Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading pro-slavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

    @peterseibel yeah I learned about that from this book too! there's so much in here that I didn't know

  • Making Comics

    Lynda Barry

    The idiosyncratic curriculum from the Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity will teach you how to draw and write your story Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images. For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus, and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can’t draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn. Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

    the book has a lot of wonderful drawing exercises that aren't about technical precision at all https://t.co/ZZHj9map4f

  • Making Comics

    Lynda Barry

    The idiosyncratic curriculum from the Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity will teach you how to draw and write your story Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images. For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus, and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can’t draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn. Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

    @imAnushree you might like this book too: https://t.co/NWOqreczpf, i read it and it was really a magical experience

  • Lower Ed

    Tressie McMillan Cottom

    Drawing on her personal experience as a former admissions counselor at two for-profit colleges and interviews with students, senior executives, and activists, Cottom explains the exorbitant price tags, the questionable credentials, and the lose-lose options for Americans seeking a better life.

    trying to learn more about what's going on with tech bootcamps today by reading @tressiemcphd's book "Lower Ed"

  • @ArlanWasHere i have a zine collection that came out in August: https://t.co/iOljCQKhqf

  • Effective Python

    Brett Slatkin

    Updated and Expanded for Python 3 It's easy to start developing programs with Python, which is why the language is so popular. However, Python's unique strengths, charms, and expressiveness can be hard to grasp, and there are hidden pitfalls that can easily trip you up. This second edition of Effective Python will help you master a truly "Pythonic" approach to programming, harnessing Python's full power to write exceptionally robust and well-performing code. Using the concise, scenario-driven style pioneered in Scott Meyers' best-selling Effective C++, Brett Slatkin brings together 90 Python best practices, tips, and shortcuts, and explains them with realistic code examples so that you can embrace Python with confidence. Drawing on years of experience building Python infrastructure at Google, Slatkin uncovers little-known quirks and idioms that powerfully impact code behavior and performance. You'll understand the best way to accomplish key tasks so you can write code that's easier to understand, maintain, and improve. In addition to even more advice, this new edition substantially revises all items from the first edition to reflect how best practices have evolved. Key features include 30 new actionable guidelines for all major areas of Python Detailed explanations and examples of statements, expressions, and built-in types Best practices for writing functions that clarify intention, promote reuse, and avoid bugs Better techniques and idioms for using comprehensions and generator functions Coverage of how to accurately express behaviors with classes and interfaces Guidance on how to avoid pitfalls with metaclasses and dynamic attributes More efficient and clear approaches to concurrency and parallelism Solutions for optimizing and hardening to maximize performance and quality Techniques and built-in modules that aid in debugging and testing Tools and best practices for collaborative development Effective Python will prepare growing programmers to make a big impact using Python.

    @maxcell it's a book but maybe effective python would help? https://t.co/tr6bnsOIIM

  • The Linux Programming Interface is the definitive guide to the Linux and UNIX programming interface—the interface employed by nearly every application that runs on a Linux or UNIX system. In this authoritative work, Linux programming expert Michael Kerrisk provides detailed descriptions of the system calls and library functions that you need in order to master the craft of system programming, and accompanies his explanations with clear, complete example programs. You'll find descriptions of over 500 system calls and library functions, and more than 200 example programs, 88 tables, and 115 diagrams. You'll learn how to: * Read and write files efficiently * Use signals, clocks, and timers * Create processes and execute programs * Write secure programs * Write multithreaded programs using POSIX threads * Build and use shared libraries * Perform interprocess communication using pipes, message queues, shared memory, and semaphores * Write network applications with the sockets API While The Linux Programming Interface covers a wealth of Linux-specific features, including epoll, inotify, and the /proc file system, its emphasis on UNIX standards (POSIX.1-2001/SUSv3 and POSIX.1-2008/SUSv4) makes it equally valuable to programmers working on other UNIX platforms. The Linux Programming Interface is the most comprehensive single-volume work on the Linux and UNIX programming interface, and a book that's destined to become a new classic.

    hanging out with my favourite Linux book this morning. I love that the chapters are so short (usually less than 20 pages) and I always learn something interesting by picking a chapter and reading it. https://t.co/fZBNu8rfU8

  • @kubukoz there's this: https://t.co/BIWkUV8JOX

  • The Linux Programming Interface is the definitive guide to the Linux and UNIX programming interface—the interface employed by nearly every application that runs on a Linux or UNIX system. In this authoritative work, Linux programming expert Michael Kerrisk provides detailed descriptions of the system calls and library functions that you need in order to master the craft of system programming, and accompanies his explanations with clear, complete example programs. You'll find descriptions of over 500 system calls and library functions, and more than 200 example programs, 88 tables, and 115 diagrams. You'll learn how to: * Read and write files efficiently * Use signals, clocks, and timers * Create processes and execute programs * Write secure programs * Write multithreaded programs using POSIX threads * Build and use shared libraries * Perform interprocess communication using pipes, message queues, shared memory, and semaphores * Write network applications with the sockets API While The Linux Programming Interface covers a wealth of Linux-specific features, including epoll, inotify, and the /proc file system, its emphasis on UNIX standards (POSIX.1-2001/SUSv3 and POSIX.1-2008/SUSv4) makes it equally valuable to programmers working on other UNIX platforms. The Linux Programming Interface is the most comprehensive single-volume work on the Linux and UNIX programming interface, and a book that's destined to become a new classic.

    my favourite Linux reference: The Linux Programming Interface https://t.co/VQbz5uNtSn

  • The Manager's Path

    Camille Fournier

    Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal--especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager. From mentoring interns to working with senior staff, you'll get actionable advice for approaching various obstacles in your path. This book is ideal whether you're a new manager, a mentor, or a more experienced leader looking for fresh advice. Pick up this book and learn how to become a better manager and leader in your organization. Begin by exploring what you expect from a manager Understand what it takes to be a good mentor, and a good tech lead Learn how to manage individual members while remaining focused on the entire team Understand how to manage yourself and avoid common pitfalls that challenge many leaders Manage multiple teams and learn how to manage managers Learn how to build and bootstrap a unifying culture in teams

    periodic reminder that @skamille's The Manager's Path is amazing. It really helped me understand the differences between a tech lead / manager / director / CTO even though I've never been a manager https://t.co/nCEgnY9eSZ

  • @aidanweatherill yeah it's also on Amazon, no starch's international shipping is super expensive :( https://t.co/u1lrgSPquJ

  • The book Stolen Sharpie Revolution is a really nice guide to drawing and photocopying zines. It's the guide I used to get started: https://t.co/xjTsiiju0X

  • Ed Mastery

    Michael W Lucas

    .@mwlauthor's new "Ed Mastery" book is really fun. I've been learning about vim/unix history this morning by reading it! https://t.co/yqZjANG5GZ