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What is the "bible" of your hobby or activity?
Last weekend I took an avalanche safety course to get more comfortable with backcountry skiing. During the course the instructor told us to get The Tahoe Skiing Atlas and couched it as "the bible for backcountry in Tahoe". It made me think about the other "bibles" I had, like All the Rain Promises and More... for mushroom foraging or Tartine Bread for making sourdough. The folks on Tildes have such an amazing assortment of interests and I'd love to hear about your "bibles" and the activities, crafts, or hobbies they help with!
There was a previous post on this topic from 2019 that was deleted by the OP, but I was able to find it from my comment history: https://tildes.net/~books/ha0
I really owe you for that link - I realized I am in possession of one of the books mentioned there, so I've dug it out of its hidey hole. I think I'm going to find it quite useful given it's relevance to my current hobbies!
I tinker with electronics on occasion, and the book The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill is an essential reference. I also sometimes do recreational coding, for which The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth almost always contains good advice. Not a good introduction for a beginner though, unless they are highly motivated. In the kitchen I always have Joy of Cooking handy. Its recipes and advice are quite reliable, though somewhat plain or understated at times.
I have always had that handy. It really is the bible of cooking; its big and dense, I'll never read the whole thing, and I have my favourite parts and ignore the rest.
I picked up lockpicking as a pandemic hobby. There are a ton of great resources, but the MIT Guide to Lockpicking is probably the "bible" - covers the basics and fundamental concepts that still apply, despite being ~30 years old.
Can you recommend a beginners pick set? Have always wanted to get into this
Theres tons of stuff out there. Some companies with decent quality are sparrows, southord, multipick, jimylong, covertinstruments, and peterson. They should all have a starter kit or three. Definitely avoid cheap amazon kits. The main things I'd look for would be the pick profiles that come with them, the quality/ergonomics of the handle, and the turning tools. The main picks are used for single-pin-picking, which is the more deliberate style that is akin to solving a puzzle. There are also various "rakes", which are used by rapidly moving the bumps over the pins to hopefully set those pins. Raking is often a quick way to open a lock, but if you're more interested in the puzzle-style, then they are superfluous.
I'll note that picks typically range from 0.015-0.025" in thickness - thinner means you can fit into tight keyways, but are often more fragile. And there are various profiles like shallower picks that fit better into smaller locks, deeper picks which can push up on pins in the back of the lock, and the tip of the pin might be flat or rounded or even have a little divot. Its hard to say what you might use. Many starter kits have a few in 0.025", and perhaps a single thinner pick at 0.015". Some meet in the middle for a 0.018-0.020" that should be a good blend of both.
I started with the Sparrows Tuxedo kit, which was solid enough quality and a good price. The picks don't have any grip, so I picked up some electrical shrink wrap from amazon to make some. Doesn't look too pretty, but it worked. The main thing that set lacked would be "bar-style" turning tools like these and/or these. I ended up picking up both of those bar sets after I knew I was interested in the hobby.
If you want to jump ahead a bit, I found that lockpicking was sometimes rough on my fingers/wrists, so I ended up with some jimylong picks (grip is based on surgeon tools) and these ergonomic turning tools.
It looks like jimylong has a starter set, so I'd probably recommend that. Great quality for great price.
I'd definitely recommend /r/lockpicking and their discord as a resource. They have a "karate belt" style ranking system that you can participate in, which doubles as a good list of interesting locks roughly sorted by difficulty.
Finally, just a note on legality - never pick a lock that is in use or that you don't own. Its very easy to "brick" a lock and render it inoperable. Don't try to help your friend when they are locked out of your house - you can make the situation worse and its a good way to get the cops called on you. Before you start, look at toool's lockpicking laws page to get an idea of the legality of lockpicks in your state. In most states, owning lockpicks is not enough to be charged with a crime - you also have to show intent to break in/steal. But good to know the laws, especially when traveling. I often travel through an iffy state when seeing family, so I won't bring a pick + lock for demonstrations.
Feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer =)
Thank you so much!
The lock picking lawyer is your Jesus
I'm just a hobbyist in recording/mixing music, but reading Bobby Owsinskis' "The Mixing Engineer's Handbook" was when things really started to click with me, after a year of a lot of uncertainty with my mixes. I read through it during the lockdowns and while my mixes are still inconsistent, I was finally able to hear and understand EQ/compression changes, which were two huge things that I couldn't wrap my head around. I see that book recommended the most frequently, and from what I understand hasn't changed that drastically from edition to edition.
Have any examples? I'm familiar with DIN standards for components (nuts, screws, washers, etc.) but not any overall design ones.
An index on your area for rockhounding and mineralogy. It will list, by species, exhaustive references to technical literature where it was noted and discussed. For example, Minerals of Colorado by Edwin B. Eckel et al.
One can do similar lookups on mindat.org, but I still prefer having the book.
Yes! I just got a little pocket book esqu guide for minerals and rocks of Colorado and I'm so stoked to take it with me on my hikes this upcoming season. Very good to have on hand.
I don't want to speak for all of IT, since it's such a giant field, but I think most if not all IT people have heard of the books about Operating systems by Tanenbaum and Clean Code(r)/Architecture by Martin.
I find "Clean Code" to be the ramblings of a very angry man and not that helpful in writing software?
[edit: he's also quite right wing]
Reads like a hit piece based on his politics rather than a genuine examination of the work, especially with this in the footer.
In fairness, the first three quarters or so is purely based on his technical output - his code, and some of his articles about types and testing. To me at least, those are fully enough to discourage me from recommending Uncle Bob for programming related purposes. The politics side of things isn't necessarily pleasant to me, but I was never going to recommend him for his politics, so I'm a bit less fussed about that.
But from all my experience with Clean Code (and Clean Code codebases), and from his writings on how best to maintain software quality, I can't recommend his stuff without adding enough caveats to fill a second book. Where he's right, I think there are better sources to get the same advice, and all too often I completely disagree with his recommendations.
Quoting the footer without context like this is misleading to the point that the only two options I can conceive of are that you either stopped reading after you saw that footnote, or that you're deliberately trying to misrepresent the article in the comments here.
The article is not about Clean Code. The section on clean code is tiny, and it is almost entirely quoted from a deep dive done by someone else who has read Clean Code -- a blog post that the author recommends you read yourself. The author is not obligated to read Clean Code and dissect it in detail in an article whose thesis is basically "Uncle Bob has a ton of bad opinions" when it's merely one example out of many of his bad opinions and someone has already done the job more thoroughly themselves.
The vast majority of the article is criticism of Uncle Bob's bad technical opinions. These are opinions that he has stated in places that aren't Clean Code, therefore the author has read and is clearly able to engage with them. He quotes others' rebuttals to these technical opinions throughout as well. The section on Uncle Bob's political views is absolutely miniscule by comparison and consists mostly of links to other sites discussing his bad political opinions and behavior. The author even acknowledges that most people dislike him for his politics rather than his bad technical opinions!
To frame this article as a political hit piece, one would have to believe that any criticism of someone's politics is inappropriate even when accompanied by detailed and thorough criticism of their bad opinions about software development. Even when the article in question does not purport to be politically neutral whatsoever, and in fact clearly sets out that it aims to criticize Uncle Bob's opinions across both the technical and political spheres.
Do the author's criticisms of Uncle Bob's inability to understand what a type actually is and weirdly dogmatic views about language features not count because the author also criticized him for being extremely sexist and racist? Because that's honestly how your comment comes off to me after having read the linked post.
I would argue that the vast majority of the article is stupid "gotcha" analysis of practical advice for software engineering being dissected under the scope of computer science, and that the main purpose is to drag Martin.
I'm actually reminded of Knuth's immortal words: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." This is a case of the opposite: much of the advice and opinions shouldn't be taken as mathematical theorems but rather as heuristic rules from practical experience writing testable code that should be broken when necessary.
Criticizing his technical criticisms on those grounds is totally valid (whether I necessarily agree with your conclusion or not; I'd have to reread and put more thought into it to form a final opinion there). It's framing the piece as a political hit piece based on its including both technical and political criticisms despite the technical criticisms being the primary focus of the article that I had a problem with.
Yeah, people kept pushing that book at me, including a manager who had no programming knowledge or experience. When I finally read it I found a junior-level conceptual mistake in some code given as a shining example to aspire to. This supposedly “self-documenting” code would have given any maintenance programmer a lot of fun times.
Ahh, Uncle Bob. I'm not a coder or programmer but I know the name through Factorio. The main Factorio dev stated that he was a huge fan, caught a little bit of shit for it and then immediately lashed out at his community, doubled down, and then used the Factorio Twitter account to start calling everyone snowflakes, that was weird.
Don't know the guy, but many of us Czechs (especially gen X and older, but not exclusively) tend to really dislike culture wars-y things and anything smelling of judging people for wrongthink, for historical reasons. So if the criticism on the dev was not just because people disliked the contents of Clean Code but also because they disliked the author himself, that's probably the reason.
Keep it up. He deserves it :D
Honestly, this makes me want to read it more. I'm not a programmer by trade but some of my best lessons learned in programming have come from more experienced angry software engineers (angry at code, or process and not me personally).
I would read this which explains some of the ways in which the things he advocates are problematic
Here's another great article on why Clean Code sucks
Clean Code is one of those things where every beginner and moderate developer should follow the rules.
Once you are expert its like being a Grand Master in chess. You break the rules because you've learned why they exist.
Why should beginners never write a function that’s longer than four lines, includes more than one kind of control flow, or has a magic number or two?
IMO that’s terrible advice that prevents people from getting their feet wet. People gotta walk before they run.
To be fair, the book explicitly says not to take the advice as law. It's one of those things where the advice must be taken with salt and a critical eye.
The thing is, most juniors don't think much about readability, or even naming, until they inevitably deal with some unreadable code or a senior walks them through what good code looks like.
I also haven't found any better books that give well-reasoned actionable advice and heuristics. There are books like Code Complete and Pragmatic Programmer, but they're not code style manuals and they don't explain what "readable code" really is.
If someone at your company made a rule "never write a function that’s longer than four lines" please slap them for me.
Hopefully no companies do that, but that is in fact the advice that's given in Clean Code
you guys are doing a bit of a straw man if you ask me.
I advocate for clean code. but the number of lines per function is always a guideline/code smell and not a hard rule.
"clean code" and "Clean Code" are not the same thing. The first is just a principle of keeping your code straightforward and readable, which is obviously great. The second is a specific methodology described in a book of the same name, which sucks and explicitly states that functions longer than a few lines are bad.
this guy disagreed with you, I think? https://tildes.net/~hobbies/1eiq/what_is_the_bible_of_your_hobby_or_activity#comment-c4tm
(tbh its been a while since I read it)
In any case, I teach lunch'n learn sessions on clean code at my company. Would never endorse taking the words of any one author as god. It always practical that books are guidelines, and any and all forced rules must be documented in Confluence. Confluence is god :)
Angry is not the same as dogmatic and he moved more and more to the dogmatic.
His advice can be useful. Back in around 2013 his presentations on Clean Architecture sparked something in my coder brain and I have no problem to admit that I even adopted a form of that design in my current gig in a finance startup. Because it made sense.
But it does take experience to see what is useful from his writings and what is not. I remember some examples he gave where he would literally create a new function for every operation that required more than one line of code. If tildes supported emoji I would put a facepalm Picard here.
Sorry that that's the case!
Interesting, that wasn't my impression at all. Whenever I recommended it to Juniors in our team I've gotten rather good feedback. Obviously, it's dated and many things have changed over the last decade, especially in IT, but I find it's a good help to set some guard rails when you're rather inexperienced. Even if you don't follow many of his rules, at least that means you've thought about why you don't do it, which is probably more than many do :D
That said, any book recommendation that basically helps with the same things and covers the same/very similar topics that I can recommend to Juniors? Maybe there's something more up to date :)
Unfortunately I've never found anything better. I don't think the book should be taken as a literal bible, but even the book says that readers should find things they disagree with. If nothing else, it does a fantastic job explaining why programmers should think about naming and readability.
I know experienced devs have a sixth sense for readability, but I have never seen a cohesive and actionable explanation of clean code outside of that book. There are other great books on software engineering, but I still swear by Clean Code as something every junior should read.
A Philosophy of Software Design is always my recommendation when this comes up - it's also about the similar idea of creating "good" code, but I think it does a much better job of explaining the "why". For example, the concept of modules and interfaces discussed in the book is probably the best explanation I've found for why some code intuitively feels better than other code.
The only thing I'm unsure about is how early you should start reading APoSD. It's slightly more high-level (and therefore potentially less directly actionable) than Clean Code. On the other hand, the actionable parts of Clean Code (functions without parameters, shorter lines than that, etc) are typically the worst parts because they instill such bad practices. I've only recommended it once to a junior (who was asking for book recommendations), and that was a couple of weeks ago, so I'm still waiting to see what they think of it and whether it lands.
Thanks for the recommendation! I actually have that sitting on my shelf, so I'll give it a read and let you know what I think in a month or two. (I also need to read Designing Data Intensive Applications for work so there are few books on my plate).
Clean code is absolutely not a perfect book, but I still think it's useful. For most people, the author's strong opinions at least get them thinking about what clean and readable code actually looks like. Ironically, the practical chapters are the worst part of the book as they do an awful refactor to make code "cleaner", so they're best skipped in my opinion.
I wouldn't generally recommend Clean Code. Its advice needs to be taken with a pretty big grain of salt, and there are surely much better books today.
If anything, I think its lasting value is that despite the bad advice, it helps get new developers thinking about what good, readable, and maintainable code looks like. It's also pretty approachable and easy to read.
That's about everything Uncle Bob writes in my experience.
yeah that was a sad day when I learned that. fuggin boomers man. They are all the same.
Maybe Film Art: An Introduction and Narration in the Fiction Film, both by David Bordwell. They're not bibles, but rather well known references.
Thanks for this. I've been trying to build my collection of reference materials for film production. Do you have any other suggestions? It's really hard to find good resources that focus on practical application vs. theory.
I sure have. If I understand correctly you're looking both for theory and filmmaking correctly? I'll look for some references when I get home.
Correct, any suggestions you have would be awesome! Thank you!
In my area of math:
I'm sure people who study exercise science would have their bibles but lifting doesn't really have a bible. But there are thought leaders. They have some books but the chief proliferation of their ideas is by word of mouth, interviews, and published programs.
Yes, it's called Supertraining by Mel Siff. : )
The Gang of Four.
The most important book in computer science.
Influential, yes. But not a Bible and more for „Object Oriented Business Software Engineering“ than computer science.
I rather think of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs or Knuth‘s The Art of Computer Programming when I think about foundational texts.
Especially since most of the field is slowly realizing that object oriented programming is not that great idea and that there might be something to functional programming and composition over inheritance. OOP has also solidified position of single dispatch as the dominant method dispatch pattern for many years to come. That itself is a mixed blessing, especially now that IDEs are starting to be able to complete at arbitrary spots and just looking to the left of the period does not quite cut it.
Knuth's TACP comes very close to a bible, but it's mostly not read. Only referenced. And then you usually find required materials with a simple web search faster than getting up and walking to the book shelf. Perhaps it's time for his work in a searchable, thoroughly hyperlinked and SEO-optimized website format. :]
I'd recommend Head First Design Patterns for most people since it's written in a more approachable style and uses modern Java. It's also endorsed by one of the Gang of Four!
I've been a hobbiest woodworker for 10+ years and have consumed way too much content. I don't normally go to books for woodworking learning, but I will say this book is a modern and approachable guide to woodworking with some great lessons.
Hybrid Woodworker - The Wood whisperer https://thewoodwhisperer.com/product/hybrid-woodworking-book/
I would highly recommend some YouTube honestly (Bourbon Moth or The Wood Whisperers channel) but that's not the question!
"Psychology" by Peter Gray is considered the starting 'psychology bible' in my circles. Your question immediately took me back to the first week of Uni, when I started my bachelor's in psychology, and a professor said "you will know this book inside and out by the end of this year. If you only buy one book, buy this one please".
I still like referring to it if I need to grasp a quick reminder of a subject. It's not simple reading material mind you, but it's very straightforward in its systematic explanations of the history of psychology all the way up to modern consensus around e.g. Attention Theory or Group Dynamics.
If you're considering studying psychology, I'd honestly recommend seeing if you can easily get through this book. If you like the subject it's a breeze, but if you don't it's (apparently) very overwhelming.
I've only read the 6th edition, and this was in 2012 so it's a little dated, but I read through it again not that long ago and it still holds up surprisingly well for how rapidly the field usually changes. It's one of the few books I keep on hand near me from my studies, and it's served me well!
I'm now looking forward to the 20 seasons of the show Gray's Psychology.
Hahah, I don't think it'll do very well. There's a lot less sex in on-call rooms or crazy plane crashes :p
"I need a free appointment slot to start CBT-T with a plane crash survivor within three months...STAT!"
We could also finally get to see what psych is doing while they ignore consult requests in emergency medicine TV shows.
I've been tinkering on classic cars for decades. Our 'bible' used to be the Chilton's manual for whichever car you bought. Pictures and a step by step how to guide on any kind of maintenance problem.
But I'd say Chilton's has been replaced by youtube videos. I'm amazed by how many guys take the time to document fixing a repair problem on a vehicle - even if it's a fairly obscure problem on a rare vehicle, there's usually something I can find online and MANY times watching that one 10 minute video has saved me hours of frustration trying to figure out myself. The real heroes even list the part numbers they needed and where they bought any specialty tools.
I work in computer graphics for a living. Physically Based Rendering would definitely be the bible for photo-realistic rendering. It's one of the few books where I keep different editions of it around.
(Disclosure: I'm proud to be cited in a few places in it.)
Does it have to be in book form?
I'm a wannabe hobbyist woodworker (hi @markpelly !) living vicariously through YouTube content creators, but I am slowly (excruciatingly so) building my shop and one thing I'm really interested in making sure I do well is dust collection.
If you start looking into dust collection, you'll read the name Bill Pentz over and over. He's got great info and gives perspective on how underpowered most shop dust collection really is.
https://billpentz.com/woodworking/cyclone/index.php
Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langewiesche. Terminology is a little dated now but airplanes fly the same now as they did in 1944. Pretty much required reading for any budding pilot.
Probably the bible, given my hobby is studying theology.
Certainly "Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills" has earned bible status in mountaineering. It's been out for 60 years and seeing how each revision changes to account for new best practices is a history in itself.
One of my hobbies is conlanging, or inventing languages. There have been a few books written specifically about the topic, but as far as as "bible" goes, at least a few years ago, the "bible" was not a book about conlanging. It's a book called Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists by Thomas Payne, and like it says on the tin, it's actually written for linguists documenting un- or underdocumented real languages. But it's really a whirlwind tour of the incredible variety and complexity of real languages, and a primer on how to describe them in technical language. If you have any academic interest in languages at all, I highly recommend it.
Languages are a viewing platform onto the worldview of different cultures. It's controversial to what extent language influences thought, but I don't think it's controversial at all that language reflects culture. It's also a marvelous antidote to racist ideas about some cultures being inherently primitive, and so may be of interest to anthropologists and culture scholars. Some languages associated with peoples who have very quote-unquote "primitive" material culture have features like evidentiality, or the mandatory verbal marking of the source of information (did you observe this directly, is it hearsay, did you infer it logically, is it considered common knowledge?). These kinds of things could do wonders for challenging the idea that people who live in straw huts and don't use 21st century technology (or whatever) are inherently less intelligent or incapable of logical reasoning.
For animation it would probably be Richard Williams' Animator's Survival Kit.
It's definitely worth considering some of the criticism of it though:
https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=869
"Proficient Motorcycling: The Ultimate Guide to Riding Well" by David L. Hough
I haven't had time to participate in my hobby for a few years (since the birth of my first kiddo), but The Old Buzzards Soaring Book is kinda the bible for rc glider flying. (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/16130009)
It's very informative and also super cute. Written from the perspective of a dude talking to a literal buzzard, who describes air currents and how to stay aloft with minimal effort/energy. I loved reading it and it taught me loads and loads about glider flying.
My other big hobby (and career), mathematics, has many bibles. Best known are probably Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis and Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra. My personal bible here changes often but was most recently Elliptic Functions According to Eisenstein and Kronecker by Andre Weil.
I've never skied in Tahoe but there's another, more general and oft-recommended bible for touring as well. Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain
For my job, this is the Bible.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-007-0211-0
Yes, it is six volumes and over 4000 pages.