[michaelsbradley]

Book (digital and/or print, free and/or paid) recommendations to learn proper and effective use of this kind of accounting to manage personal/family and self-employment finances.

Best resource would assume competency in undergraduate-level math, but assume no financial competency beyond "you have a checking account, maybe a credit card, and are familiar with receiving income and making payments, and you understand the importance of keeping your bank balance above zero".

[simonmic]

You said book, but I wouldn't rule out the docs on hledger.org (and perhaps plaintextaccounting.org); of which https://hledger.org/hledger-by-example.html is book-ish, and https://hledger.org/accounting.html leads to some good general accounting resources.

Also, again not what you asked for exactly, but the hledger chat room can be a very useful extra resource, to keep things moving along.

And here's one I found useful, though with more of a business flavour: "Accounting Savvy for Business Owners: A Guide to the Bare Essentials" by Philip B. Goodman CPA.

[michaelsbradley]

Thank you!

[ElevenLathe]

This is a website for posting with other people, but this post sounds like an LLM prompt.

[MarkusQ]

Weird. You're right, but I can totally see the OP's POV as well.

This reminds me of the way clickbait/spammy style (or, before that Headline-ese and News-speak) invaded interpersonal communication. LOL. Evolution of language WTF, AIR?

[laurent_du]

I think the person you are answering to was asking for a book recommendation.

[michaelsbradley]

Yes, I was asking for a book recommendation. I forgot to add a question mark, or should have phrased it as "I'm looking for...".

My comment was generated with my brain and entered through my keyboard. I've been submitting and commenting on HN with this account since 2012.

[lvass]

LLM prompts tend to be generated like that, though.

Here, your question prompted on chatgpt. You're welcome. https://chatgpt.com/share/68b9abc5-ae94-8007-b90e-cf210c3182...

[michaelsbradley]

It’s just asking a well-formed question, which has been a thing for a while in human history. Lol!

Seriously, the Hledger software looks great, more appealing to me than GNU Cash for various reasons and something I’d be more likely to recommend to others. And I’d like to have a book recommendation/s to go along with it. Learning personal finance through the school of hard knocks can be painful, and even if you learned it that way it may be difficult to communicate what you’ve learned effectively. I imagine someone somewhere sometime has written a nice book that would pair well with Hledger.

Thanks for the link. I have AI accounts and sling prompts all day long some days. In this case I’m looking for recommendations from fellow humans who participate on HN.

[lvass]

>I have AI accounts and sling prompts all day long some days

This wasn't hard to guess. Beware of your interactions with LLMs creeping in when talking to humans. Best of luck! And I suggest you take heed of Simon's advice.