Books on Adam Koszek - Personal Website

Drawing in 30 days

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Trying to take the first steps in drawing with this book is much easier. I wanted to get more professional lesson and do something about my mindless doodling, and this book was the right purchase.

If you’ve never drawn, you get to do step by step introduction about techniques, supplies and really easy, approachable examples of simple things that will look decent when you try by yourself.

Get it and your results will be improving the more the more you practice.

Everybody Writes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Didn’t remember this book whatsoever after several weeks after reading it.

Shoe Dog: A memoir by the creator of Nike

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby Cookbook

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Clean Code

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This book is a classic for books about writing software, but in general I found it underwhelming. Java code is verbose by default, with all its public, static, protected even refactored, you end up with a similar level of complexity. That’s the take I had from that book: several examples were indeed refactored and the end code was shown, but I had “meh” feeling about whether it really helped the program readability.

The Art of Plain Talk

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Probably one of the best books on language, writing and readability in general. It’s very good take on phrasing readable sentences, keeping language clear and concise.

The key take away were the results of the readability studies Flesch did in early XXIth century. He found certain relationships with age and education and its impact on text readability.

Before I read this, I didn’t know about the algorithms for readability. The formulas in the book seemed a little abstract, yet there’s something appealing at having a single score of your written text. Microsoft Word has Flesch’s algorithm embedded.

Scientific Advertising

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

David Ogilvy and many other authors of copy-written ads mentioned Claude C. Hopkins was their hero, and that his book is a mandatory reading. You should at least look at it, if you want to get a full experience for your advertising and marketing education.

The myths of advertising being “creative” are debunked here. The advertising from a purely scientific format is shown. Ads are treated like salesperson, and the same demands are expected out of them. Bringing money to the table, and making a sale is what he talked about all the time.

King of Madison Avenue

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to make software products, you must know design. Even when I worked for the hardware company, my software was used by humans, and they object if what you make sucks. I’ve made a script used by many engineers for result reporting. And the output was shared in the web, PDF and printed form. For stuff like this you must know design, otherwise you’ll fail miserably.

This is one of the few books for hackers to introduce you to design step by step. The amount of unnecessary fluff is minimal. It uses easy language, without many scientific details which you’d forget anyway.

Non-designers design book

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a biography of David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather.

You will get a behind the scenes look at the advertising agency and business, but you won’t get much of advises about advertising of how to write a good body copy.

For this, look at other books by the same author.

I decided to read this book, since I was intrigued by Ogilvy, since it appears he did his homework on measuring the efficiency of ads like no one else, and I wanted to understand how much of what I see in the Internet is a well-measured manipulation, researched or a random spam.

Ogilvy on Advertising

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So you have built something and you want to sell it. Direct approach probably works best, and you can blast the information about your product to the potential prospects through the e-mail. But you don’t know how?

You’ve never done it, right? You just keep making websites and software, and you’re good at it, but somehow your stuff isn’t gaining traction?

Do you make it a short e-mail, with a simple image on top? Or a long one, explaining everything step-by-step?

256 bloghacks

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You created a blog, but it sucks? It has beautiful minimized HTML, great JavaScript and CSS and renders flawlessly on iOS 6. The problem is that nobody but you is accessing your blog?

Exactly.

I made this blog in 2012, but didn’t really think about it much. I restarted the efforts in 2015 and 2016, but had moderate success (hundreds visitors “spiking” when I published something, and then traffic dying out after 2 days). That’s the moment in publishing online where you think: “Really, that’s all I get by publishing stuff to millions of people?”

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

White Coat Investor

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Would you like to get better with the personal finance?

Who wouldn’t right?

You’re not alone, if you still think that some things in your wallet happen by accident. And often you forget and later are surprised.

Many of us are like this, and often getting a good advise of how to change this stage of things is challenging.

This book could be a remedy. Originally targeted towards doctors, I’ve found it very useful as an engineer. Just smart part of this book is directed towards medical procession. Most of it is universal.

Good to Great

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

747

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

An amazing insight into the building of the biggest passenger plane of that time. This book does a good job at explaining what building complex engineering projects are all about. One of the phrases that stuck with me was that the plane is designed so that all the parts can be serviceable and testable, and whole which are too deeply buried inside of the structure of the plane must last 20 years.

Launch It

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

On writing well

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This book is similar in nature to other guides, but it’s fairly packed. It’s a very useful little title that I picked up, since as a non-native speaker, you naturally “miss” things other people may find obvious.

This is one of the top bestsellers on books about writing.

Zinsser went though the written English language in points and he explained how to remove clutter, simplify your English and bump up your writing. It’s the first book where I understood that the passive voice weakens your expression.

The Willpower Instinct

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Phoenix Project

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Everything Store

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Miles

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On Writing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Audiobook format of “On writing” was excellent. King read it himself. This is what I like about audiobook: they make the form be rich and more colorful by adding this another dimension. This might be one of the few positions where I can recommend the audiobook over a paper book.

First of all books are great. I believe you’ll have the same while reading or listening to King.

There’s a great part about writing as compared to telepathy. This was my favorite moment in a book. Another one was King’s commentary on his own accident.

The Art of Learning

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It’s at least two years now that I’ve listened to it, but I I still remember good stuff from this book. Like imersing yourself with things you study about and making sure you keep recalling/using them often. You’ll be a better learner after reading this book for sure. This comes from a person who mastered more than one field and carefully gathered notes on what it meant and how he did it.

Delivering happiness

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Daily Rituals

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Total Recall

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Really good book which I’ve picked up after my exposure to Teach yourself Ruby in 21 days

The accompanying the book is the archive of 1600+ examples in the source code form, which I’ve written about here:

https://www.koszek.com/blog/2015/09/01/the-single-biggest-collection-of-ruby-scripts/

Worth to note: 50% of this book is API reference. Initially I didn’t like that, but now I feel like it’d be a good opportunity to go and create some Anki sets from this reference for further revising.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you were present somewhere close to Bay Area circa 2014–2015, and you’ve asked about some resources for entrepreneurs and people interested in startups, there are several well-known classics which are considered a Mekka of startup knowledge. Today I’m proud to announce that by audio bookshelf has been extended by 1 important resource and I feel soon it’ll become a classic referred to by many individuals.

Horowitz’s “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” is written in a pretty interesting style. Just like one of the things which you may not know about Steve Vai is that he’s a bee-keeper, you may not know is that Ben Horowitz seems to be be a fan of certain style of music. Which one? Get to learn it from the book. Prelude to each chapter consists of quotations from several artists. I may not be a big fan of any of them, but I’m a big fan of all drummers which these people hire for live tours. Consider it a quiz!

Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Even though that books on whining aren’t among ones which I like the most, I must say that Daisey’s title surprised me greatly. This is a very unique book, both in a style and the content. Author, unlike many ones which I’ve got to know, with a great distance to himself explains how it felt to be a part of early days of Amazon. Moving from customer service through the steps of organizational ladder he landed in departments which made no sense back then.

Organized mind

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 20 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes it makes me think how much information XXI century human being can intake with intellectual hiccup. It’s a fairly known fact that as we move forward with medicine, science and human knowledge in general nowadays, the knowledge of past generations starts to be available at our fingertips.

My detour to “Organized Mind” was in hope to figure out how other people deal with information overload in modern times. I struggle with a amount of data you can intake from interviews, audiobooks and podcasts. Other people I know struggle from task and priority management. When I think about this, one can open Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages on a 27-inch screen and with several screen scroll you can spot, analyze, classify and consume content (let’s skip the usefulness or the value derived from these sources) and act upon it. How to apply the same methods to all information which flows in your direction? Is there a system?

Just My Type

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We’re all surrounded by text. Be it an electronic version or a good and old-school paper hardcover book, the thing that makes books readable are fonts.

I don’t exactly remember how I start to pay attention to how letters in books are shaped, but it was pretty early on. My English teacher in a 2nd grade of primary school exposed me to British and American English books, and I’ve noticed significant different in letter shapes, as their block letters were not alike script taught in Polish school.

Made it stick

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Accelerating learning should probably be my logical step before I started to read and listen to (audio) books, yet I came to this topic quite late. During one of the trips back home in KQED I’ve listened to a great podcast entitled: “Science of Smart” where a research of Roedriger was mentioned.

General message out of this book is that studying-by-repeating and cramming for exams are the most common “learning” techniques applied by students of high-school and universities. Yet the research proves that it’s testing and quizing that actually helps us retain the knowledge and actually master it.

The Innovators

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Probably the most comprehensive study on the history and current state of computing and innovation. From Ada Byron to Bill Gates. From mechanical computers, through tubes to the transistor. Explained is the history of modern computing.

Chapter 3 reminded me that in the early days people building computers didn’t recognize the domain of programming at all. It’s quite fascinating to think that I graduated from a domain which 50 years earlier wasn’t even recognized. In the old days people building computers would write programs, and due to the nature of their programming (low-level programming with 0 abstraction of hardware interfaces) it’s hard to be surprise by that state of things.