It turns out that “reading a book cover-to-cover” is not a normal activity for me.

I like to jump around, skip sections, read a quarter of a book and pick up another one, etc.

I considered modifying my behavior to satisfy this market, but that felt costly rather than useful.

So N/Aing.

Have you read any books yet?

@Pazzaz Not cover to cover. It turns out that's actually a pretty annoying requirement.

@Alana If I don't read a book cover-to-cover by EOY I will resolve N/A. <3

How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie

This might be the most-useful-per-unit-of-time-spent-reading book I've ever read. A book filled with useful practical advice and stories about interpersonal relations, made me more pleasant to spend time with and improved my life quality overall by improving most of my interactions with other people. I wouldn't read a summary personally because you don't really internalize the lessons enough with a summary, hence I have a habit of reading this book around every 2 years (and I've read it 3 or 4 times at this point). A quick read too.

@Tassilo@Tassilo covered more ground than the theory of CS class at my university. Slides are for free on Aaronsons website. If you know the basics of computability and computational complexity, just read the three slides starting from "randomness". If you already know what BPP, BQP, P/Poly and one way functions are, then you don't need to read this.

@Tassilo hard to read that one cover to cover. Maybe count it if you read as many pages as naive set theory is long? Only read the "preliminaries" section and regretted not picking up this book earlier. I don't think I learned anything worth remembering from reading the first half of naive set theory but YMMV.

Perspectives on Projective Geometry, Jürgen Richter-Gebert:

This book is quite extensive and IMO both practically and theoretically useful. It covers not just projective geometry (and uses it as a tool to do euclidean and affine things) but also dives into hyperbolic geometry. It has both coordinate and coordinate-free exposition, as is good.

@degtorad Though cover-to-cover is pretty improbable a thing from my POV. But maybe that’s because I can’t ever make my priorities straight and I lack time management skills. I don’t know how often this is valid for other people though.

@degtorad Overbought a bit, sorry.

@degtorad Also:

Linear algebra via exterior products, Sergei Winitzki:

Again, quite an extensive book and encourages coordinate-free approach which I personally am a fan of. Doesn’t require any prior linear algebra knowledge if I remember right.

@degtorad Finally I don’t remember about Halmos, but GEB was I fine book I guess but I don’t think it was necessary. It has ideas, it has narrative, but, well, for example are its puzzles useful for later? I doubt that…

@degtorad This is exactly the kind of content I made this market for. Thanks

@degtorad I second the linear algebra book as linear algebra is a prerequisite in almost any math/physics course.

@meiqian Im already working through Kunze Hoffman, and I also might read Axler. Any particular reason to prefer Sergei Winitzki?

@Alana Btw a friend of mine reads Axler and is very fond of insights the book gave him. He hadn’t read my suggestion though yet. Probably not ever. 😅 He’s not too mathy. And I haven’t read Axler much too. So cover-to-cover bet might be at a miss but maybe try one of them after reading a half or a third of another, then read to completion regarding the overal experience?..

@degtorad The book by Kunze Hoffman also seems nice. I don't like Axler's book as its definitions of trace and determinant that use eigenvalues only work for algebraically closed fields. The Sergei Winitzki's book covered some stuff not in the KH book though like Cayley Hamilton's theorem and Liouville's theorem.