[Agingcoder]

This book ( or rather a much older edition ) literally changed my life, by essentially teaching me that the whole of a computer was about measurable tradeoffs, from hardware to software.

The fact that it was true for hardware as well hadn’t been obvious to me till then, coming from a math background and being a self taught coder.

The beauty in this is that you can then build systems that fly if you understand the tradeoffs of all your layers, and make sure you fall on the right side of each of them.

Rather unsurprisingly, I ended up doing HPC, where this is all pretty obvious, but I strongly believe that this is true for all software.