Ask HN: Are there any good self development/hacking books out there

Just bought this on your recommendation, what do you think of it?

Full disclosure: I wrote Zero to Superhero.

That eHow book looks sorta cool. Thanks!

As the co-author of TPoSaNA I am flattered but for the question at hand, I'd recommend a different book. Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly is more in line with what he's looking for. http://www.tomontime.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0596007833/tomontime-20 for more info. (Of course, since I wrote this other book, I don't mind recommending it :-)

--Tom

This is a great sentence which sums up the sort of things that many self help books will drag out to 400+ pages.

I'd seriously encourage anyone who wants to improve their life to spend the time sat down with a pad scribbling out what they're happy with about their lives, what they're not happy with, what they want to change and coming up with their own plan for doing so.

For the most part anyone on this board is smart and more able to solve their own problems than a generic self help book which will generally take a couple of bits of common sense and then string them out into a whole book.

Don't get me wrong, I love books and I love reading but in the case of self help books I think more often than not they're targeted procrastination and the time would be better spent addressing the things you're not happy with.

As more technical from Pragmatic series:

http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer

I love this book.

While that book is a great classic on product development, it's not strictly about hacking.