9th edition. Exam practice: MIT OCW 18.01 past exams.

Reference: learncpp.com. Practice: Codeforces.

Free alternative: Book of Proof (Hammack).

Start once Calc I derivatives are done.

Read first. Free at augmentingcognition.com.

Free transcript.

A man who will not perform the feelings he is expected to have, and is condemned as much for that as for what he did. Camus' clearest statement of the absurd, in a novel short enough to read in an afternoon and awkward enough to sit with for years.

Free on the Orwell Foundation website.

Have it; used throughout.

Private notes an emperor wrote to himself, never meant to be published. Mostly reminders he clearly needed repeating: control what is yours to control, the rest is not an insult aimed at you.

Free at paulgraham.com. Start with Writing, Briefly and How to Think for Yourself.

In Poor Charlie's Almanack; free in the Stripe Press online edition.

Free: Baseten online edition.

Munger's talks and writing, built around the idea of a latticework of mental models — borrowing the big ideas from every discipline rather than forcing every problem through one. The chapter on the psychology of human misjudgement is the one people come back for.

Hamming's lectures on how to do work that matters, drawn from his years at Bell Labs. Less about technique than about judgement: which problems are worth an open door, and why the people who do great work are usually the ones who prepared for luck.

After Calc II. Free: MIT OCW 18.06, 3Blue1Brown Essence of Linear Algebra.

Nand2Tetris. After C++; the course is free at nand2tetris.org.

After Nand2Tetris.

Free on the authors' site.

After linear algebra and mechanics. Free preprint at modernrobotics.org.

The history of our universe, but with too much unmotivated technical detail and not enough context.

The first Russian psychological novel. Pechorin remains one of literature's most compelling antiheroes.

Lyrical prose that captures the beauty of nature and human spirit. Paustovsky's writing is deeply atmospheric.

The psychological depth is unmatched. Dostoevsky dissects the human soul with terrifying clarity. Essential reading.

Absurdist satire at its finest. Gogol's vision of Russia is both hilarious and haunting.

A novel in verse that defines Russian literature. Pushkin's mastery of language is breathtaking.

The generational conflict between tradition and nihilism. Turgenev captures the tension of a society in transition.

Dickens on an industrial town run on facts and calculation, and what that does to the people inside it. The shortest of his novels and the angriest about what gets lost when everything is measured.

I went into the book expecting another iteration of self-help or life advice books, but ended up really liking it. The author organizes all of Naval's online advice into a nice structure around achieving happiness and financial freedom in life.

A devastating satire of Russian provincial gentry. Shchedrin's dark humor cuts through hypocrisy with surgical precision.

Unique spin on the contact with aliens theme with a compelling reveal. It's also nice variety to have the backdrop of the Chinese cultural revolution; an uncharacteristic and unique setting for a typical sci-fi novel.

The defining work on the principles and pscyhology of achievement. This book is famous, but still underrated. It isn't about becoming rich - it's about achieving anything you desire. The philosophy can be applied to building wealth and everything else worthwhile.

Man versus nature in the Siberian wilderness. Astafyev's prose is raw and powerful.

One ordinary day in Dublin, told through eighteen episodes that each invent their own way of being written. Difficult on purpose, and the difficulty is the argument: consciousness does not arrive in clean sentences.

The bible of starting a massive technology company. Anyone interested in startups needs to read this.