Thankfully, the experts in each field effectively review the books for you. An there are more widely-respected, serious scholarly works of true genius than you can read in your lifetime. The signal-to-noise generally is very high, misinformation is low, and writing by the very best is often very engaging.

In other words, if all you read is the very best humanity has to offer, you still won't live long enough to read more than a fraction of it. So why waste your time on anything else?

* Ask an expert; this is a simple question for them. A university library's reference desk has worked well for me. For example, looking for books on Egypt, I contacted a university library referece desk and was connected to the library's Arabic Studies reference librarian, who had a Ph.D. in the field from an elite university. What was a challenging question for me was probably offhand knowledge for him. (Of course, respect their time (be prepared and patient) and the fact that you are not entitled to their services, but he seemed excited that a member of the public was interested and serious.)

* Look for scholarly articles reviewing publications in the field. I use Google Scholar but I get the impression JSTOR is better if you have access (I've never used it and know little about it). In each case I've read several articles to triangulate what is widely accepted and what is particular to that author, and to fill gaps in each author's coverage. However, I find the review articles themselves fascinating, almost essential background on what I want to read, and tend to get lost in them. Lacking expertise myself, I still feel uncertain about the conclusions I draw - what don't I know? what context am I missing? - there is no substitute for expertise.

* Look at class syllabi at universities. This has been slow going: I have to find the classes and the syllabi (if available), and then hope it includes more than an unannotated list of books.

* Do not: Use general web resources. It seems like the general web and the scholarly world are two separate silos of knowledge. I find 100x more valuable information in the scholarly articles, and random people on the web are often badly misinformed (this includes Amazon reviewers, a great source of complete nonsense that sounds good until you know better).

Overall, it makes me appreciate the resources available to university students, who have free and easy access to experts in a huge variety of fields, all paid to help them.

- Avoid news brought up by social networks - people like and share what's emotionally engaging, so the story writers have a very strong incentive to embellish. Majority of the "news" on social media is either bogus or empty.

- Major newspapers check credentials of their guest authors. Those guest articles aren't always correct, but signal/noise is way higher.

- Articles in peer-review journals are usually right, especially the bigger journals with more eyes on them.

- Approaching a librarian is not as hard as it may seem. Here's UW. for example: http://www.lib.washington.edu/about/contact

- Apparently there's a "24/7 Reference Cooperative", a nation-wide librarian Q&A service: http://wiki.questionpoint.org/w/page/13839418/24%207%20Coop%...

Why? I think it's because this stuff is hard, so many variables, publish or perish, and the fact that while referees for any field can filter out a lot of guff, they have strict limits in their ability to determine correctness. That comes when the results of a paper are used as the basis of further research in other labs.

Not only are they concise, but they are highly referenced and well annotated. As long as you are willing to dig into the specific terms and concepts relevant to the subject yourself, you will find a very high S:N ratio in these papers.

The best part is that you can easily find yourself down 4-5 different rabbit holes by the time you are done because of the easy to follow references.

The reason I think these are more valuable than the pop psychology/business airport books is they don't operate under the pretense that the world's great truths can be boiled down to 240 pages. Rather, learning about people's experiences and stories on there own terms helps you develop a much more nuanced worldview.

For example, I'm reading The Battle Cry of Freedom, an overview of the Civil War, and it's astounding how much more insight a book about something 150 years ago offers into today's society than just about any of the Gladwell genre stuff.

Thats the period I was least interested in going in, but have ranked as the best History book I've read.

Ignition: http://web.gccaz.edu/~wkehowsk/ignition.pdf

"Excuse me, sir...": ftp://www.fourmilab.ch/pub/etexts/www/gergel/isopropyl_bromide.pdf

http://books.simonandschuster.com/1776/David-McCullough/9781...

Bill Gates calls it one of the most important books he's read in his life. "People often ask me what is the best book I’ve read in the last year. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined stands out as one of the most important books I’ve read – not just this year, but ever." http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Better-Angels-of-Our-Nat...

"Taleb shows no signs of having read Better Angels with the slightest attention to its content. Instead he has merged it in his mind with claims by various fools and knaves whom he believes he has bettered in the past. The confusion begins with his remarkable claim that the thesis in Better Angels is “identical” to Ben Bernanke’s theory of a moderation in the stock market. Identical! This alone should warn readers that for all of Taleb’s prescience about the financial crisis, accurate attribution and careful analysis of other people’s ideas are not his strong suits."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1Dm2ZYeA6U

* the Flynn Effect

* various points of human psychology (victim vs perpetrator bias)

* the crime spike in the 90's and its causes

* a critique of Freakonomics' hypothesis that abortion caused the decline of the 90's crime wave

* Sections on bullying, animal rights, gay rights, women's rights, etc.

* The various types of wars and their individual proximate causes for decline.

* An interesting section on self-control, how it works and how its lack contributes to crime. Even fascinating pragmatic information on how one's own self-control can be improved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption

All of Atul Gawande's books, notably:

The Checklist Manifesto [1]: http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance: http://atulgawande.com/book/better/

[1] You can read the essay that this book is based on in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

But we are not doing it. Why? Because we misallocate the founds.

Looking at the data (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1306801) there were 721,800 what they call health care associated infections in 2011 (I couldn't find newer data). If the rate goes down at what the article suggest, (75%) then we will save 541350 people a year using this method whereas it would cost more than 1.8 Billion dollars to save the same amount of lives using the Against Malaria foundation.

This is almost 500 times as effective!

How do we get this knowledge to people who have 2 million dollars to spare?

* Seeing like a State by James Scott - a good political history with lots of insight into many conventions in our modern society, such as even last names, were created to make society manageable by a central government.

* Europe and the Europeans by Barzini - the closest thing I have found to being a time traveler, skipping between different places and times in Europe from 1920 to the 1970's.

Feynman's little popular science book _QED: The Strange Theory of Light & Matter_ is a gem. It's very short and non-mathematical, but still manages to get remarkably close to the truth.

If you're more mathematically inclined (e.g., fluent in multivariate calculus) and know a little classical physics, the first 5 chapters of Wald's _General Relativity_ are an essentially complete introduction to the subject.

Another classic is Shannon's _A Mathematical Theory of Communication_, which introduces the subject of information theory, and then solves basically all the subject's main problems.

In economics, I think the record for signal to noise is probably held by Keynes _The Econonic Consequences of the Peace_, 118 pages, in which he basically forecasts the disastrous course of events from 1918 to 1939.

It's absolutely the best book for anybody who keeps a blog or writes any sort of non-fiction. I try and re-read it once a year.

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

(I listened to it as an audiobook). It changed the way I think and feel (or at least how I react to feelings). Other interesting books about philosophy/spirituality are

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The last one is the least recommended, I'm not sure I got anything out of it, but I read it in in the same period of time as the ones above, so I might have learned something subconsciously.

I've had pretty good success with this method. As a browse the book store, I check the author and put down books that are written by journalists. If the author is a researcher or a distinguished person in their field I take a closer look at the book and check the reviews.

Credit where it's due: learnt about this book in an edge.org conversation[2] between Dr. Harari and the eminent psycologist Daniel Kahneman.

Speaking of professor Kahneman, I recently finished his "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (I did notice it's mentioned in the comments, but still), over a period of deliberate slow reading of 5 months. Much has been said and written (more than well deservedly!) about this book. Don't let the title invite you to dismiss it off as yet another over-simplifying popular psyocology book; it's anything but that. It is an account of about 30 years of collaboration with his late colleague Amos Tversky. Certainly not a breezy page-turner. It's well worth it to take your own time to assimilate the content.

  [1] http://www.ynharari.com/sapiens-the-book/short-overview/
  [2] http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional

I found Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond to be perhaps a better book of similar nature overall, and would add in The 10,000 Year Explosion by Cochran and Harpending as another good one for those who liked Sapiens.

I read it 22 years ago and it pays off regularly.

Republic Lost by Lawrence Lessig had a high density of ideas.

Pretty much a must-read for anyone interested in sales, marketing, or "persuasion". However, even if you're not in that line of work it will blow you away. Lots of good examples and not a lot of fluff (despite what you might think just based on the title).

That was just the most outrageous example, but there are plenty more. But as far as I know it's the best book on the subject, and as "Luc" says in the other comment right now in this subthread, he doesn't oversimplify the science.

If you like that, for more of the same without a lot of fluff I'm finding The Magic Furnace by Marcus Chown to be wonderful, it's is a history of the elements. How we deduced the very existence of atoms thousands of years ago, then generally much more recently their nature, then how they came to come about (e.g. fusion in stars). Truly fantastic and rather tightly written, the fluff about the philosophers and scientists is generally only a sentence or three.

If you like both of those, as I recall, haven't read it since the '80s, George Gamow's 30 Years That Shook Physics ought to fill out the rest of the basic picture, focusing more on our friends the electrons, which is where almost all the action in chemistry happens, that's something these other two books don't cover in as much detail as the nucleus.

It wasn't like e.g. the Cambridge labs where so many critical experiments were done with such simple apparatus ... which got if anything less coverage outside of describing the experiments.

I suppose he found the story he told about the village too neat not to include in the book, but he or his editor should have had a little more restraint, it's pure noise. I shudder at imagining the size of the original manuscript....

  Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter; 
  Penrose The road to reality; 
  Greene The elegant universe; 
  Greene The fabric of cosmos; 
  Greene The hidden reality; 
  Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach; 
  Asimov Understanding Physics; 
  Ivanov Easy as pi; 
  Boyer a history of Mathematics; 
  Robbins What is Mathematics?; 
  Russel principia mathematica;

E.g., I did not find Courant/Robbins as high density, though it is a very good book still.

Asimov was also a master at nonfiction writing for laypeople. Most of his books were nonfiction (they were easier for him to write).

Very little fluff in a book that claims to be able to provide "40 percent of a two-year MBA program in ten days", at a fraction of the price?

If you want no-fluff writing on technical subjects, look for a good textbook on the subject of interest. I think people are averse to it, probably an artifact of formal education. But if you can find a well-written, introductory text, on any subject, I think you'll be amazed at how much you can learn from them, while actually enjoying the experience.

It's that sweet spot where it's not as dry as a textbook but not full of fluff like some pop psychology book.

It does look interesting, and I think I may give it a spin. That said, some of the most valuable lessons in an MBA are technical (finance, marketing, operations).

Not really. I just Google things like, "best textbook on <subject>", and you'll end up on some Amazon reviews or SO thread that will at least get you started.

This is where tablets shine, being able to put a literal ton equivalent of paper on a single, portable device.

You might also like Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

The Art of Computer Programming.

http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Synthesis-Form-Harvard-Paperback...

I love food, and I love the anthropology of food. The writing here is engaging and entertaining, but the content is quite interesting if you are at all curious about mid-century French cuisine from the perspective of an American ex-pat chef.

It is literally one idea per page. Virtually noise free - but does demand some thinking on behalf of the reader.

A typical example of psychological discovery discussed in the book: 1. Ask someone to give 3 or 10 examples of when they were assertive 2. Ask someone to grade themselves on how assertive they are

And the study shows that people who were asked for 3 examples of how assertive they are were more likely to grade themselves as more assertive that those who were asked for 10 examples due to recollection bias.

I mean, I could see how this is sort of interesting but it's such low stakes. How would anyone be able to grade themselves from 1 - 10 on how assertive they are? What does that even mean? What implications does this have on anything?

I don't know. Psych experiments that are so glorified in the book seem to me to be too convenient and a form of story telling, which is fine except for the troubling implications that our cognitive biases and inefficiencies somehow trump our free will and freedom. But then again, I have my own biases.

For instance, one experiment shows that frowning can have effects on your disposition. As an experiment, a subject is told to hold a pencil in their mouth in a certain way as to unknowingly produce a frown or smile and then do some task. The difference between behaviors is then attributed to smiling or frowning, as though the only thing going on with a pencil awkwardly in your mouth is the smiling or frowning.

Maybe I do view all psychology in a negative way but I imagine I find it distasteful the same way (I imagine) most people find the study of IQ differences among races distasteful. Is this a valid field of study? I don't know and I don't care to know because the racist overtones are so strong.

Unfortunately psychology, especially 'pop' psychology has been used to deny people their free will and restrict freedoms.

It goes along with an overall trend of the sciences to rely more and more on statistical methods which I find troubling.

It's one of the few books I've read several times. Writing this makes me want to read it again.

- Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface

- Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

- Effective Modern C++

- SFML Game Development

- Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools

For understanding computer networking, Computer networks by Andrew Tanenbaum: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Networks-Andrew-S-Tanenbaum...

For physics (though old now), Feynman's lectures: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Feynman-Lectures-Physics-boxed-set/d...

My $0.02:

Andy Groves - High Output Management fits your bill

Most Seneca

Robert Frost poems (but maybe S/N is TOO high for comfortable consumption here)

2) Ontogeny and Phylogeny by S.J. Gould

3) The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

These books have very little fluff and will challenge you to think in new ways about evolution, biology, and the development of human knowledge.

    In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation

Combinatorial optimization is very important for many practical problems and increase in computational power and improvement in algorithms has lead to an immense increase in the scale of problems which can be tackled. This book describes these developments through the lens of the travelling salesman problem

"Access to Knowledge (A2K) is the umbrella term for a movement that aims to create more equitable public access to the products of human culture and learning. The ultimate objective of the movement is to create a world in which educational and cultural works are accessible to all, and in which consumers and creators alike participate in a vibrant ecosystem of innovation and creativity."

2) Sci-Fi author L. Sprague de Camp's 1963 book, "The Ancient Engineers", covers the period from early Egyptian engineering up to Galileo. http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Engineers-L-Sprague-Camp/dp/03...

“History, technology, culture, finance, and sociology intersect here. It’s not history from the top (kings and such, which some say is dry), nor history from the bottom (average people, which is necessarily endless and perhaps not very revealing). It’s history from the nuts-and-bolts middle – how structures were built, how materials were transported, how wars were fought. When you know this sort of foundational information, everything else becomes more real.”

3) Paul Calter, "Squaring the Circle: Geometry in Art & Architecture", http://www.amazon.com/Squaring-Circle-Geometry-Art-Architect...

"the combination of the subject knowledge of design, architecture, art, geometry, philospohy, music theory, and mathematics ... Calter includes the basic lessons and explanations of a regular Geometry course in his book, but then he interweaves an integrated classical curriculum (based on deductive reasoning)"

4) Georges Ifrah, "Universal History of Numbers", http://www.amazon.com/Universal-History-Numbers-Prehistory-I...

"the first complete account of the invention and evolution of numbers the world over ... Dubbed the "Indiana Jones of numbers," Georges Ifrah traveled all over the world for ten years to uncover the little-known details of this amazing story. From India to China, and from Egypt to Chile, Ifrah talked to mathematicians, historians, archaeologists, and philosophers."

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

When you learn that it's a book deal spun out of a blog, the frustrating reading experience makes much more sense.

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson

Artificial Life - Steven Levy

On Writing - Stephen King

Machine Learning for Hackers - Drew Conway and John Myles White

How Doctors Think - Jerome Goopman

Cholesterol Clarity: What The HDL Is Wrong With My Numbers? - Jimmy Moore & Eric C. Westman

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco - Bryan Burrough & John Helyar

I can recommend Feynman's lectures on physics and Bruno de Finetti's "Theory of Probability. A Critical Introductory Treatment".

...but it may not be what you want (some may consider it fiction)

Even more terse and incisive is the 150 year old essay that inspired Hazlitt to write his book, Frédéric Bastiat's "What is Seen and What is Not Seen." [2] It's uncanny how well this essay holds up today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson

[2] http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

  The Extended Phenotype
  Your Inner Fish
  Thinking Fast and Slow
  The Information
  Chaos
  Statistics in Plain English
  Fortune's Formula
  Fooled by Randomness
  A Random Walk Down Wall St.
  How to Win Friends and Influence People

No bullshit guide to math and physics: http://noBSgui.de/to/MATHandPHYSICS/

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

The Royal Society Winton Prize is excellent: http://www.theguardian.com/books/royal-society-science-book-....

Some personal favourites:

The Incredible Unlikeliness Of Being by Alice Roberts is a wonderful book that describes how a human being develops from conception to adulthood in minute biological detail.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh is fantastic, if a little out of date by now.

Cosmos: The Story of Cosmic Evolution, Science and Civilisation by Carl Sagan.

  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.

One critique I received was that there is repetition of ideas but I think its because primarily humans carry past successes anf failures so most of the changes are evolutionary to what worked previously and second this book is akin to a thesis and every chapter is essential to building up the case.

By far the best non-fiction I've read.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...

(1) In the first sentences, the author (a PhD student in history) cannot really hide his irritation that someone with a background in animal physiology has written a popular book about history. I have seen this ad hominem several times about Jared Diamond. Somehow those historians cannot stand that someone with no degree in history has written such a popular book.

(2) "Guns, Germs, and Steel attacked the notion that racial superiority explained Western global pre-eminence, a view taken seriously by almost no one who’s taken seriously"

Actually, what Guns, Germs, and Steel did, was to provide a first comprehensive theory (that I have heard of, anyway) that explains why Europe, and not someone else, rose to dominance. This is the merit. The main merit is not that it, as a side product, discredited the racially based theories.

Failing to understand this difference does not speak highly of the writer of the review.

[1] http://www.columbia.edu/~saw2156/HunterBlatherer.pdf

So the OP asks for high signal to noise ratio. There comes a recommendation, and then I read some good discussion on Reddit on how the book is actually kind of wrong.

This begs the question: What's "high signal to noise" anyways? Someone who has read 10 books on a subject will find barely anything new. One who just starts out might find "gems" on every other page.

And also: If a recommendation here in this "Ask HN" is given and then debunked as mediocre, how sure can one be to actually find a book with high signal to noise without reading the book?

In that sense: Thanks for your comment. In-depth discussions like the one on Reddit is really necessary, because I, as a starter, have no clue how to evaluate a book. Every recommendation should probably come with a lengthy discussion about its accuracy by people who know the subject :)

My emphasis with my comment is to read books, ideas with healthy dose of skepticism, rather than worshipping it as gospel.

One factor of that may be because Asimov didn't really understand the material, turns out he hit a wall when going from differential to integral calculus (the 2nd part of introductory calculus, very basic stuff), so I now view it with suspicion.

If you can read French I recommend "Petit traité de manipulation à l'usage des honnêtes gens". To give you an idea, the translated title would be "Little treatise on manipulation for honest people". Unfortunately, it is only available in French.

http://www.amazon.fr/Petit-trait%C3%A9-manipulation-lusage-h...

1. "Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People" by Steven Vogel. If you were fascinated by the wings of birds or little waves behind the plants in water read this. Fascinating book!

2. "The meme machine" by Susan Blackmore. Starting off where Dawkin's book ended.

3. "Three steps to yes" by Gene Bedell, beside Getting to Yes already mentioned here.

I read this about the same time I read the Selfish Gene, had a similar effect. It's one of the few philosophy books that I still think about today.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OGLKHDO

The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition (interview with the one of the authors, if you're unconvinced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI3B5eT9NA )

==For finances:

The Millionaire Next Door (filled with a lot of interesting facts and habits from extensive research)

==For food/cooking:

Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen

BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking

Loosely speaking, Eagleton is best known for Marxist literary theory (dialectical materialism).

[Edit: removed html-style tags]

2. Subroto Bagchi’s MBA At 16: A Teenager’s Guide To Business

3. Jugaad Innovation: A frugal and flexible approach to innovation for the 21st century by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja

Off the top of my head were pretty information dense in the sense that I remember walking away from them knowing a good deal more about something I didn't previously

The Information, James Gleick

A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss

Abundance, Peter Diamandis

I was also thinking that a non-fiction book with no fluff and no injection of personality/flair from the author is a textbook. There are many outstanding textbooks (like Molecular Biology of the Cell) which offer pure information, but I think commercial non-fiction books are aimed at a more general audience. The author needs to fluff a book up a bit to make the material approachable. I also wonder how some non-fiction books would read if untouched by editors.

Author: William T. Vollmann

It's a 7 volume set, but has a one volume abridged version which is one of the more fascinating and thought-provoking books I have ever read. I rate it very closely to GEB.

Highly recommended.

Which, incidentally, doesn't have a particularly high "signal-to-noise ratio" but it's one of the most interesting books I've ever read.

On the more technical side, it's somewhat cliche but, TAOCP really is excellent.

Homer and a few Greek plays

Sample a bit of the great story teller Herodotus, then read the birth of historiography in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which by itself is also very interesting and important (wonder why the Founder of the US didn't like direct democracy? There are very important object lessons in it).

Surely Plato and Aristotle deserve some attention! The contents of the latter's Rhetoric is essential for when you can't reach people with dialectic.

Euclid's Elements is still about as good as you can get for what it teaches.

Plutarch is great, but I really like that period of history. To it I would add reading some of the earlier bits of Livy.

Read, or better yet listen to audio of a few of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, out loud you can follow their Middle English.

Machiavelli's The Prince is still damned good, and a landmark in talking about politics as it is, not as how people would like it to be.

Shakespeare surely needs some attention by English speakers. Swift's Gulliver's Travels were amusing when I read them in their original, and obviously very influential.

So, yeah, check out some of the classics.

- Quantum Computing since Democritus by Scott Aaronson

- Cryptography Engineering by Bruce Schneier et al

- Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli

- Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden

"The signal and the noise" by Nate Silver

are worth look.

All (literally all) signal

Here's two books if you want to learn about math you might want to learn about: The Facts on File Dictionary on Mathematics by Gibson, and Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics by Howard Eves, which takes a historical approach, but is not a history per se. More like "this is what the Greeks did, in this period the use of calculus was pretty loose and look at this equation that Euler thought was right, these are the steps that brought rigor to it" etc.

Susan Wise Bauer has been writing a series of history books solely focused on "politics", i.e. no coverage of the arts besides occasional mentions; that can be a very useful framework to then hang study of things like the arts off of. Also no wild speculation like Guns, Germs and Steel is filled with, if it wasn't written down and passed down to us, it gets only brief mention. Here's the first one: http://www.susanwisebauer.com/books/history-of-the-ancient-w...

Samuel Eliot Morison wrote a series of book on the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, they're focused on what happened in detail, with charts of the movement of the ships in various battles and so on. The TV series Victory at Sea was based on them, and they're a good framework to then hang more detailed study of the war off of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_Naval...

As Wikipedians put it, This History of U.S. Naval Operations also intentionally avoided a certain amount of analysis, for instance deferring to other works for the causes of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor. The intended audience for the work, to quote from the preface, was "the general reader rather than the professional sailor."

There are two very tight and short books on self-defense, Jeff Cooper Principles of Personal Defense and Massad Ayoob's In the Gravest Extreme, The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection, "Just the facts, ma'am", firearm centric but wonderfully focused.

ADDED: Sun Tzu's The Art of War is itself very focused (the media on which it was written strongly encourages that!), although the commentary, traditional and what modern translators add, can wander into fluff. A lot of it is relevant to modern non-violent life, and don't forget that "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you". I recommend Samuel B. Griffith's translation, he was a professional military officer.