ESI Library, March 23: the 3+2 books recommended by Luis Cabañero

We started the month of March 2023 and we published a new entry from our ESI library section. On this occasion, Luis Cabanero, one of our most recent doctors and researcher of the mommy group He shares 5 interesting books for you to read. Do you want to know what they are?, she continues reading.

Tech books (3)

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I highly value knowledge being accessible to as many people as possible, so I wanted at least two of my recommendations for technology books to be freely available on the internet by anyone, although they can also be purchased in physical format.

• Dive into Deep Learning. At this point, it is unnecessary to talk about what machine learning and artificial intelligence are, but what never hurts is to understand its fundamentals. This book teaches you how to use several machine learning libraries in a practical way while explaining step by step how everything works. He starts by talking about what linear regression is and ends by teaching some of the latest techniques today, such as the Transformers. It seems very important to me to correctly understand how these types of tools work and not to treat them as black boxes and this book focuses on precisely that.
• The Rust Programming Language. Many of you may have heard of the Rust programming language, a low-level language that promises to be suitable for writing efficient and reliable code. Well, this the official book aims to teach you everything you need and a little more to be able to program in this language. The book assumes a general knowledge of programming, so it is not suitable for newbies, but it is for any student who wants to learn a new language. This book not only teaches you how to program in Rust, but also delves into why the language includes certain elements in its design. The book goes from how to install the compiler, to how to prepare and structure a project of considerable size.
• Python High Performance (Packt Publishing). Python is a very flexible and comfortable programming language to use, but as a counterpoint it has a rather low efficiency. Luckily there are ways to write very efficient code with Python, and this book helps you do that. Start by teaching you techniques Profiling to help you identify which parts of your program are the slowest, to go on to explain various techniques such as the use of efficient arrays from the numpy library or Cython, a kind of hybrid between C and Python that is very compatible and easy to integrate with this last. On a personal level, this book was quite useful to me during the development of a tool that required optimizing the language as much as possible and also helped me to better understand the guts of Python.

Non-tech books (2)

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I love to read mostly fantasy and science fiction literature, which are genres mainly dominated by male authors. I wanted to take advantage of these recommendations to include two authors that I really like and that I think deserve a lot of recognition.

• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. This is the first book of what is currently my favorite fiction saga. The universe of the book mixes fantasy and science fiction, focusing on the Empire of the Nine Houses, a civilization distributed among several planets that stands out for having necromancers capable of animating skeletons or speaking with spirits (among many other things). The book tells the story of Gideon Nav, a young girl inhabiting the Ninth House who has a complicated relationship with the only other person on the planet of a similar age: Harrowhark, the heir to the house. The Emperor has summoned the heirs of each one of the Houses to go to the Canaan Mansion, where they must try to achieve licticity, which can help Harrow save his planet from the slow but continuous decline that it is suffering due to the Lack of young people in it. The saga is exceptionally written and it shows that the author knows what she is doing at all times. The characters, as well as their development, are great, either because they make you hate them or love them and practically all of them have a lot of depth. The book in general is written in humor, which makes it quite entertaining, but she knows perfectly when to change the tone, either to complement or contrast.
• The long journey to an angry little planet by Becky Chambers. The book tells us several stories that happen to the crew of the "Peregrina", a tunneling ship, which in the game universe means that it is equipped to make tunnels connecting two distant regions of space. The story begins once Rosemary Harper joins the crew and, as a reader, we become part of the crew at the same time as Rosemary. The crew is made up of a wide variety of individuals, including some from alien species with their own cultures and ways of seeing the world. In my opinion, the strong point of the book is its characters and, especially, the relationships between them, which feel quite organic. I like to compare this book with the video game "Mass Effect" in relation to how the dynamics between the crew members are raised, although this book has much less focus on violence.

Other book recommendations from Biblioteca ESI

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[+] February 2023, 3+2 books recommended by Elena Toothless

[+] January 2023, 3+2 books recommended by Raúl Barba

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