Hacker News was created by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, as a place for tech-savvy individuals to share and discuss interesting content related to technology, startups, programming, and more.

Initially, it started as a simple link aggregator, where users could submit links to articles, blog posts, and projects they found intriguing.

Over time, it evolved into a thriving community with a strong emphasis on intellectual curiosity, thoughtful discussions, and quality content.

I'm an avid reader of Hacker News and often come across high-quality discussions from the community. I found that the courses and books people discuss on Hacker News are really good, so I conduct monthly analyses and aggregate the top courses/books found in comments and rank them.

Why Learn C Programming

You've probably heard of C programming or you're wondering whether or not to spend the time learning the language. C programming is defined as one of the most powerful "modern" programming language, in that it allows direct access to memory and many low-level computer operations.

C is one of the lowest level languages that is still fairly readable (compared to binary code with 0's and 1's). It allows you to exploit some of the features of a computer's hardware with far more control and precision that higher level languages. A high level language would be something such as JavaScript or Python, where a significant number of libraries and functions are essentially "pre-built" and take care a lot of under-the-hood functionality but very limited precision or control.

It is important to note that today, most people who "learn to code" focus only on learning higher level languages and never understand what's going on at a fundamental level: how a computer treats data structures and types, how it assigns and manages memory, or how it stores data. If all you want to do is build a website, put a few boxes or forms here and there, then you probably don't need to understand the fundamentals of computer programming or software engineering.

However, if you want to become a software engineer, machine learning or AI engineer, a data scientist, or a full stack developer, understanding data structures and types, memory, performance, and architecture are absolutely vital to being a great engineer.

Top Books

Our methodology

We conducted this analysis by "ranking things based on social signals"

It's the result of mining the HN archives for references to books and then ranking them and displaying all references in one place.

Ranking currently takes into account HN stories (points) and comments (sentiment, karma, estimated points).

Who are we

Find accountability partners, and study online courses & books with other learners. Moocable helps you find your next course/book/problem set, and lets you find study partners.