The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

Mathematician Richard W. Hamming built the book from a course he gave at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, a course known as Hamming on Hamming because it drew heavily on his own experiences, observations and reading. Its subject is a style of thinking that leads to great ideas, which Hamming holds can be learned. He describes his part in significant discoveries and analyzes the reasoning behind them, returning often to Shannon's information theory, Einstein's relativity, Kaiser's digital filters, Grace Hopper's high-level programming and his own error-correcting codes. Along with the successes, he recounts several of his failures as examples of what to avoid. Stripe Press later reissued it with a foreword by Bret Victor.

Patrick Collison lists it on his Bookshelf page of recommended reading.