Ten Challenges by Yegge

In following Steve Yegge's comments on code size, I noticed an old post of his about ten challenges, which is really about books:

These are books that are important to me. Not in the Lewis Carroll or Herman Melville sense; they're not cherished fictional works, or even fictional works that are just thick enough to prop up the couch. For the most part they're technical books. But each of them is a book that I return to regularly as I try to figure out well, how stuff "works".

There are more than ten, obviously, but I decided to cap this list at ten books just to have a shot at finishing this essay before the end of the year.

I've read his first book, GEB, (all the way through, really!) and it's basically the most important book in my life. It helped pull me out of a post-college intellectual funk, and as Yegge says, it's hugely informative about intelligence. It provides great insight on recursion, self-reference, and much more. In fact, I did a talk (note that's a 16MB download) at RubyConf this year that was basically things I've learned from trying to apply this book to programming.

His other books are all directly programming books, which is slightly disappoint, but I've added them all to my Amazon Wish List since I've been recently feeling a bit like I've let my book learning fall away and I need to get back into it. If you're a Puppet user who's been looking for a way to show your appreciation, buying one of these books would be a great way to do so, hint hint.

Yegge's also got a Ten Great Books post, which ends up looking pretty similar but with different actual books.