Sapiens

Sapiens

 A Brief History of Humankind by

Yuval Noah Harari

A very thought provoking book. Human history said in a different light. I have thoroughly enjoyed it!

This book has 4 parts - Cognitive revolution, agricultural revolution, the unification of humankind and the scientific revolution.

- Ideas created by man - religions, human rights, liberalism

- How humans scripted extinction of megafauna of Australia and America.

- Domestication of selected animals and plants.

- How capitalism mutually helped science.

- A very good intro to Buddhism! Gives lots of hopes on how to deal with sufferings of daily life.

India Wins Freedom by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

This is a splendid personal account of Indian independence by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He was a great statesman and an unwavering patriot who positively shaped the course of independence.

This work is most notable for his judgement of various situation and future outcomes. Also his criticism and companionship with the famous three - Gandhiji, Nehru and Sardar Patel.

One key takeaway is that a capable leaders should step up and keep doing the good work, because if they step back, future might take a different undesirable course. Stepping down of Azad from Congress president-ship in 1946 seems to be very untimely and indirectly resulted in the bloody partition caused displacement of fifteen million people and loss of million lives.

Few words on Abdul Ghaffār Khān. He was from NWFP, bordered to Afghanistan. He was the leader from Pathan/Pashthoo tribe and also a great friend of Gandhiji and Congress. When congress and Gandhiji decided they were going with partition, he felt he was betrayed and rightly so. NWFP couldn’t join India and also couldn’t remain independent. Plebiscite determined NWFP to go with Pakistan. His later life under Pakistan government was miserable. One of the sad chapters in Indian history..

Elements of Programming Interviews: The Insiders' Guide Paperback by Adnan Aziz, Tsung-Hsien Lee and Amit Prakash

A good book to prepare for Programming interview. It has lot of practical tips to prepare for the interview. This book covers basic types in language, Arrays, Strings, Linked Lists, Stacks and Queues, Binary Trees, Heaps, Searching, Hash Tables, Sorting, Binary Search Trees, Recursion, Dynamic Programming, Greedy Algorithms and Invariants, Graphs, Parallel Computing, Design Problems, Language Questions, Object-oriented Design, Common Tools, and Advanced Questions (Honor Class).
I believe this books helped me in getting through Amazon interview!!

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

Thank you Martin Kleppmann!

This is an amazing book covering internals and details of big data, cloud computing, massive scaled systems. A great book for system design. This book gives a good perspective to the engineer to take informed decisions from various design choices available.
Book covers Reliable, Scalable and Maintainable Applications; Data Models and Query Languages; Storage and Retrieval; Encoding and Evolution; Replication; Partitioning; Transactions; The Trouble with Distributed Systems; Consistency and Consensus; Batch Processing; Stream Processing; and The Future of Data System.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma (Author), Richard Helm (Author), Ralph Johnson (Author), John Vlissides (Author), Grady Booch (Foreword)

This is a book on patterns used in object-oriented design. Quite a classic one! Enjoyed reading book cover to cover. It has 23 design patterns and the authors explained the intention, motivation, applicability, structure, participants, collaborations, consequences, implementation, sample code, known uses and related patterns for each. Book is not very difficult to follow.
First chapter is the introduction to design patterns. Second chapter is a case study, a document editor, through which covered 8 patterns. Third, fourth and fifth chapters covered all 23 design patterns under three subsections - creational patterns, structural pattern and behavioral patterns.
The very first pattern author introduced was a structural pattern, composite pattern. An amazing solution for the problem at hand.
A must read for a professional who deal with OOD!

Object-Oriented Modeling and Design by James Rumbaugh, M Blaha, W Premerlani, F Eddy, W Lorensen

This book outlines a systematic approach to software development life cycle based on object-oriented technology. It covers
- Modeling concepts
- Methodology
- Implementation
- Application case study
Object Modeling Technique(OMT) combines three views of modeling system
- The object model - static, "data" aspect of system
- The dynamic model - temporal, " control" aspect of system
- The functional model - transformational, "function" aspect of system.

I have covered in depth modeling concepts. And it gives holistic approach to the end-to-end development of complex system. Skipped for now the rest of the topics.

Algorithms - I; CLRS, Introduction to Algorithms; MIT 6.006 Introduction to Algorithms

A super book on algorithms and can be used by professionals who wanted to brush up the fundamentals.  "6.006 Introduction to Algorithms" is an online course from MIT which follows this book as the textbook. Topics covered in this course are
- 3. Growth of functions
  * Big-O
- 4. Divide and conquer
  * Recursion
- 6. Heapsort
  * AVL
- 12. Binary Search Tree
- 13. Red-Black tree
- 8. Sorting in linear time
  * Counting Sort
  * RADIX Sort
  * Bucket Sort
- 11. Hash tables
- 22. Elementary Graph Algorithms
  * BFS
  * HFS
  * Topological Sort
  * Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)
- 24. Single-source shortest paths
  * Bellman-Ford Algorithm
  * Dijkstra's Algorithm
- 15. Dynamic programming
  * Optimal substructure and Overlapping subproblems
- 34. NP-completeness (only introduction, more in next course)

Living the 7 habits, Stories of Courage and Inspiration, Stephen R. Covey

This book is a collection of real stories capturing amazing transformations in people’s life.  Each one of it was very inspiring. Mostly I read a story a day and kept remainder of the day to contemplate it before moving to the next one.

There are around 76 stories, categorized under Individual, Family, Community and Education, and Workplace. Chapters covered in Individual and Families were more touching since I could sense the real pain of those individuals experienced it. And those are the stories of people’s self belief and perseverance to adhere to their principles. Stories covered in the Workplace were also great. In today’s world of deceit, manipulation and personal charisma, to find there are successful people who used universal principles to transform the company and lead a value based life is simply amazing and unbelievable and more than that it gives lot of hope to people who wanted to lead a balanced, quality life.

Overall its a good read.