100 books like Open Source Licensing

I learned my first programming language as a kid, and Basic always felt like a beginner’s language. It wasn’t until I started writing C that I felt in control of the machine. This book is a classic and was on every C-programmer’s shelf in the 80s and 90s. It isn’t the easiest read but is remarkably comprehensive for a relatively thin volume. The fact that it has been in print for over 30 years tells you something about its staying power.

Nowadays, I tend to code in higher level languages, but every once and a while I dip down, getting closer to the bare metal, and brush this baby off. It is probably one of my most well-worn books.

When I work with students new to programming I often find they struggle with translating the toy problems in exercises to actually doing something in the real world.

I love this book and frequently recommend it to new programmers because it is centered around problems. Coding should be about making your life easier. At the beginning, the problems are small, but by the end, you’re learning about email, PDFs, and GUIs.

Sweigart has a great voice, and reading this feels like being guided by a friend rather than yet another coding textbook.

I knew how to code when I finished school, or at least I thought I did. What I didn’t know was how to think about programs and how to structure the bigger picture. Over time and with practice, I learned how to think about design, but the journey was fraught and painful. I wish I had this book when I started out.

Coming to the book later in my career, I may have intuitively known a lot of what Ousterhout covers, but I’ve never seen it put so elegantly. I found myself nodding along and now often point coders at this little treasure.

When helping software organizations be nimbler, I tend to stress two things: release more frequently and automate everything. Over the years, I’ve frequently got pushback from the database folks. Most DBAs and Data Architects are taught a very top-down approach and want all information upfront before creating a single table.

This book teaches how to apply abstraction layers that are common in programming but not as common in database design. The book showed me how to use versioned views to control the coding interface and upended my overall approach to designing databases.

This book is the “bible” of Federal Indian Law. Mr. Cohen was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and was the first pro-Native Commissioner to hold that post. He took it upon himself and his agency to publish a treatise that Indian tribes and others could rely on to learn about treaties, statutes, and agreements that set forth the rights of Indian tribes and their members.

It’s been updated several times. It is the most authoritative text in the field and is frequently cited by courts and commentators. It doesn’t lend itself to easy reading, however. (My book synthesizes the information contained in the Cohen book and makes it understandable to the non-lawyer.)

Due to its global nature and reach, some people think that because the internet knows no borders, it also does not have limits. This concept is wrong. Goldsmith and Wu tell the fascinating story of the internet's challenges to governmental rule. They ask: who is really in control of the internet? And does the internet liberate us from government, borders, and even our physical selves? In a lively prose, the authors peppered their arguments with real-life examples concerning disagreements between giants of the internet and democratic and authoritarian governments. They show that governments have been asserting their power to direct the future of the internet.

Internet intermediaries have to filter content geographically to comply with local law for a small fraction of their communications. This imposes costs on them, and forces them to adjust to this cost of business. But in light of the internet’s many advantages, the authors argue… show more.

At first glance, you might not see why we think it’s a book for parents that addresses anti-racism. But digging deeper, you’ll see that one of the things we advocate for is developing the skills for introspection - to ask ourselves the tough questions, to challenge our own beliefs and assumptions, and think critically about the information that constantly surrounds us. Those skills are a fundamental part of our own anti-racism practices. Unfortunately, critical thinking is not a skill that’s been well taught, or evenly taught, throughout the schools in our country - so it’s important for each of us to help ourselves, and our children, learn this most foundational skill to succeed in the 21st century.

This book has a permanent place on my nightstand, where I reach for it whenever I need a pithy, brilliant reminder of how the US completed its late-nineteenth-century transformation from a country with no abortion laws to a place where abortion was banned everywhere at every stage.

I’m amazed that a book first published in 1978, long before the advent of the Internet, managed to marshal evidence from newspaper classified ads and forgotten trials to present a portrait of America where abortion was widespread but seldom dared to speak its name.

Divorcing someone with a personality disorder can be one of the most stressful things one can face. Bill Eddy is a family lawyer and therapist who understands the complexities of divorcing a high conflict person and has mastered ways to communicate and co-parent with them. This book is a must-read for anyone facing high conflict divorce as it is filled with practical tips and suggestions.

This is the definitive account of what abortion looked like for the one hundred years during which it was almost completely illegal in the United States.

Reagan does an excellent job of showing us the different ways that women nevertheless accessed abortion care during that time, even as she points out how access was always shaped by race and class.

She is also great at demonstrating how and why police and lawmakers cracked down on abortion and made it less accessible at particular moments in this one-hundred-year period, ultimately showing why it was eventually decriminalized in 1973.