18 books like SuperSight

If you’ve ever wondered how on Earth Mark Zuckerberg ended up betting his Facebook empire on the unproven technology of Virtual Reality (VR), this is the recent history book for you. 

Blake Harris starts with Palmer Luckey, a homeschooled teenager who shrugged off the received wisdom of all of his elders, and just went ahead and built the first commercially viable VR headset. (That’s an amazing story in itself.) And then he got Mark Zuckerberg so excited about this new experience that, yes, Zuckerberg ended up buying Luckey’s company – and eventually forcing him out.

The History of the Future is about technology, business, the consequences of acting on visionary thinking, and, above all, about how technology is ultimately created and developed by human beings. 

Of all the books out there about the immersive technologies of virtual and augmented reality, Jeremy’s take on the subject is the one that looks the most closely at the security issues involved, especially when it comes to enterprise deployments. 

If you’re thinking about leveraging the awesome power of these technologies in your workplace, Jeremy’s hands-on discussion of to what to look for and what to avoid is an invaluable guide.

Stepping away from the topic of immersive technology, The Ransomware Hunting Team instead looks at the realities of cybercrime in the US, and why especially our government infrastructure has such a hard time fighting it effectively. 

Like all the other books on my list, it’s an examination of what happens when the rubber meets the road with a new technology, and how we humans often just aren’t very good at adapting to change.  

Part of the key problem is that hackers – including the white hat hackers that you want on your side to bring down the bad guys – tend not to be social animals, and our official organizations are far happier hiring a smiling guy in a suit than a scowling nerd who would rather work from his dark bedroom at home.  (Apologies for the stereotypes, but – this really is a problem!) 

This book is an absorbing… show more.

Adrian Hon is the founder of the truly fabulous fitness app Zombies, Run, in which you listen to a story in which you are a character as you run or walk to work out. 

Yes, there was a zombie apocalypse in this story, and every so often, the zombies appear – and you have to run!! (I didn’t know about Zombies, Run before I read this book, but I have since started using it, and I love it!)  

Adrian has been in the gaming world for a long time, and he is highly aware of how gaming can become coercive. He built Zombies, Run specifically to avoid coercion of any kind, but is deeply infuriated by all of the games out there that shamelessly continue to rely on coercion to generate usage and, of course, cash. 

In You’ve Been Played, Adrian outlines just how nasty some techniques can be,… show more.

Our relationships with living beings like plants and animals may influence the way we treat other sorts of life—or “life”—we encounter in the future, including the artificial life we create. It’s probably prudent to consider what those relationships should look like, now, before we begin engaging with AI or aliens lacking a clear sense of how to behave toward them.

You may know of Sugata’s work, even if the name does not ring a bell. He is the Indian professor who decided to cement an online computer into a wall in a slum in Delhi, set up a hidden camera, and waited to see how the local children would react. This was before everyone had a laptop or a mobile phone. The kids quickly gathered round and quickly figured out how to do all kinds of interesting things, without any teaching. Indeed, he found that when teachers tried to ‘help’, the children stopped being resourceful, stopped collaborating as independent learners, and expected to be taught. The School in the Cloud documents the growth of Sugata’s work and global influence since that first experiment, and reminds us forcibly of just how much all children can learn under their own steam – if we will just get out of the way. 

This anthology holds a special place in my heart. I received a copy of it as a Christmas present from my dear grandmother in 1979. Just holding it in my hands brings back so many happy memories of that long-departed lady. The book contains just eleven stories, but it is “a collection of deliciously scary fare.” Among the choice delicacies contained within its covers is the shortened version of A Christmas Carol made by Dickens for his public readings of the story, which I read in his imagined voice. Alongside anthology favourites by Hugh Walpole, Algenon Blackwood, and Jerome K. Jerome are less familiar, but equally rewarding ghostly tales by Marjorie Bowen, Oliver Onions, Margery Allingham, and others. I don’t know if it is still in print, but anyone who takes the trouble to find a copy will be richly rewarded. 

This book contains many practical examples of solving common programming tasks using Clojure, and it's an excellent choice for a practical Clojure reference.

Developers who are new to the functional programming style will find a lot of useful patterns for solving problems using idiomatic Clojure style. The book is an essential reference for Clojure developers.

In industry, your data is very likely to live within a data warehouse such as BigQuery, Redshift, or Snowflake. Therefore, to be an effective data scientist in the industry, you should learn how to use data warehouses effectively. 

Once you learn data warehousing and SQL with any one of these products, it is quite easy to pick up another. So which one do you start with?

You can use Snowflake on all three of the major public clouds. Because it’s a standalone product, it is the most similar to a “traditional” data warehouse and can be picked up easily even if you are not familiar with cloud computing. That makes it a good data warehouse to start with, and is the reason my second book pick is this book on Snowflake.

BigQuery is also available on all three major public clouds, but it works best (and is used most commonly)… show more.

While it is true that I wrote the first few editions of this book, Ian has taken it over, revamped it, and made it an iconic work on the language.

It covers every aspect of C# programming, and explains not only how to do something, but why you would do it. It is chock full of best practices and patterns and anti-patterns, and is well written and engaging.