less_retarded_wiki/books.md

Books

Here there will be a constantly WIP list of books that might be of interest to supporters of LRS:

{ Let's aim for quality rather than quantity here, don't put any book that has some connection to our cause here, but rather the ones you've read and which you judge as a quality book that enriched you in some way. ~drummyfish }

• An Illustrated History of 151 Video Games (2014): Though being a bit of a modern, normie book with some shit here and there (a bit shitty writing style TBH), overall it's actually a quite nice compendium on video games, very good for example for your inawoods offline library, to cover most of the gaming topic. It covers games from the earliest up until the end of the good gaming era, with a mini review of the most significant ones, including many screenshots and interesting trivia. There are also sprite sheets, game maps and articles about notable gaming systems. It evokes a bit of that 90's kid's nostalgia of reading about games in paper magazines. (As always, try to get older editions, newer ones will probably be more shitty.)

• Blackout (2017, Elsberg): Fiction, telling a story of a large blackout in Europe that shows to really be caused by bloated tech. For collapse enjoyers this is an interesting read if only for the detailed description of the consequences a sudden loss of electric power.

• Day of the Triffids (1951, Wyndham): Excellent sci-fi in which civilization comes to an end due to a disaster (won't spoil), very nice for collapse preps or just people enjoying a great story narrated in captivating way :-) The movie is a joke, don't even search for it. Also other books by Wyndham are awesome.

• Einstein: His Life and Universe (Isaacson, 2008): Einstein's biography, quite a nice read about a pretty awesome man who's image has been so distorted by the mainstream shit.

• Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition (1911): Extremely large, old, uncensored encyclopedia, mostly digitized and fulltext searchable, also completely public domain, with very long articles on all topics up to the date of its publication. Great source of lesser known information and an alternative to modern censored sources. Also check out other similar encyclopedias.

• Flatland (Abbott, 1884): Absolutely amazing fantasy story set in two dimensional land with characters being geometric shapes, while being a critic of society to a big degree, it discusses practical and mathematical aspects of actually living in two dimensions, how the characters see, how they build their houses etc. It is now absolutely public domain!

• Free as in Freedom (Sam Williams, 2002): Free-licensed official biography of Richard Stallman, contains many historical details about how free software came to be, how open source spoiled it etc.

• Free Culture (Lessig, 2004): Creative-commons licensed (non-free but gratis) book by the founder of Creative Commons and free culture, goes into details on how copyright became abused by capitalism, why public domain is being smothered and why we must support free culture.

• Game Engine Black Book: Doom (Sanglard, 2019): Gratis, very nice book dissecting all the details about the legendary Doom engine and its internals -- how it worked, why was it so fast, what hacks went into it, written so that a reader of any programming skill (even none) will find something interesting. A must read for fans of oldschool game programming.

• Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D (Sanglard, 2019): Same as the Doom engine book from the same author, just about the older game Wolfenstein 3D, also amazing.

• Guinness Book of World Records, BEFORE 2000: The older books were excellent, ideally get some from 80s or earlier, there are funny records like most rats killed by cat in one hour, most primitive languages and so on. Do NOT buy the new editions, these are uttermost absolute garbage equivalent to an expensive toilet paper.

• Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski, 1995): A bit boring read by the famous Unabomber, criticizing rapid technology advancement, but an important read for those who are more into politics, if only for the memes :)

• ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (1999): Specification of the version of C programming language that suckless/LRS very often uses. It's nice to skim over it to get an idea how a language is actually specified. You'll also probably learn something new about C in the process.

• Just for Fun (2001): Official biography of Linus Torvalds, the original creator of Linux. It recounts valuable historical moments with comments by Linus himself, revealing many interesting details and also a bit of Torvalds' personality (shows some of his evil side).

• Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia (1995): Very nice single-volume encyclopedia that's sorted by topic, with many nice illustrations, published back then when censorship wasn't so extreme, provides overview of all topics of human knowledge.

• Masters of Doom (Kushner, 2003): Another nice book for Doom fans, this time not really technical but rather just retelling the story of the game's development -- quite comfy, a lot if interesting trivia.

• The Jargon File (1975...): Hacker culture dictionary, a lot of wisdom, inside jokes, and things related to oldschool hacking.

• Rebel Code (Moody, 2001): A bit of a mainstream view at the whole "open source" history -- though it's a small brain business view which we have to keep in mind at all times, it's a nice introduction to the whole FOSS world for the newcomers, as the book covers most of the relevant projects and people.

• Starting Forth (Leo Brodie, 1981): Good book to learn Forth.

• The Chrysalids (John Wyndham, 1955): Apocalyptic sci-fi about a middle-age-like deeply religious dystopia after a nuclear war, it's among the author's best works.

• The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells (1911): Very nice story, also in the public domain and digitized online, easily accessible. Though not related to technology, it's a great food for thought as it entertains an idea of a population of people who are completely blind which has interesting implications for their lives, and furthermore it shows that if you place someone too competent in a group of retards, they won't recognize his competence, in fact they'll see him as someone yet more retarded than they are themselves.

• The Nostalgia Nerd's Retro Tech: Nice small database of all the old consoles/computers (SNES, Amiga, C64, ...), each one with high quality photos, short summary, specs and notable games. There is not much text, it's more like tl;drs of the most important stuff, it's an ideal overview of the old computers for a newcomers but can also serve as a quick reference to anyone.

• older books by Andreas Eschbach { The new ones seemed to have some Feminist shit etc., had to stop reading it :D ~drummyfish }, mainly Carpet Makers and Jesus Video: This is not directly related to LRS but it feels right to mention one of the most underrated sci-fi authors here -- many LRS followers will probably appreciate high quality sci-fi dealing with super interesting topics that are at least loosely related to LRS. Really Eschbach is so superior to just 99% of all sci-fi you'll encounter, his books are extremely readable, believable and greatly interesting in choosing topics, he makes you think about society, religion etcetc. Spoilers probably won't help, just go check out the books.

• The Pig and the Box (MCM, 2009): A short story for kids showing the dangers of DRM, released under CC0!

• The Tao of Programming (James, 1987): Famous piece of hacker culture literature, wisdom of programming written in taoist style.

• Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus (1994): Very nice, readable book, that implements a whole 90s shooter game in C, without drowning the reader in tons of equations and smartass talk. It's written with the 90s mindset and in common language, contains many practical tricks for optimizing the code etc.

• ...

{ TODO (have to read first): Lisp From Nothing (implementing minimal self-hosted Lisp, CC0 code!). ~drummyfish }