Books, university courses, online courses and experiments that my projects grow out of. For each one — a short summary, key ideas and where I applied it.
Student at MSU, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics (CMC), program “Developer of Artificial Intelligence Systems”.
In AI, what was best practice six months ago may turn out to be a mistake today. That’s why learning for me isn’t a stage, it’s part of the job.
Reading
Ryan Day
A practical book on building an API for data and connecting AI to it. The running project is a FastAPI service with a database and documentation, then an SDK for it, using the API in analytics and, finally, LangChain agents that call the API themselves.
Reading
R. S. Bukharev
The path of server-side development in Python, from sockets and protocols to architecture and launch on a server. Django, Flask and FastAPI are covered through real projects: a CRM system, a Telegram bot with server-side logic, a REST API for a mobile app and a WebSocket chat. Separate chapters cover caching and scaling, Docker and Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and MongoDB, and security: password hashing, JWT and OAuth 2.0, protection against SQL injection, XSS and CSRF, TLS.
Reading
John Berryman, Albert Ziegler
The authors are engineers who built GitHub Copilot. The book isn’t about “magic phrases” but about how to build an application around a model: how an LLM sees text, how to assemble context for it from user data, how conversational agents with tools and multi-step workflows work, and how to evaluate answer quality.
Reading
Charles Petzold
Petzold builds a computer from scratch right on the pages of the book: from Morse code, Braille and a flashlight to relays, logic gates, a binary adder, memory and a processor that runs a program. No formulas — only sequential steps, each of them clear.
Studying
CMC MSU
A discipline of the “AI Systems Developer” program at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University. Studying it now. How an operating system manages processes and threads, memory, files and devices, and how programs interact with it through system calls. Alongside, I’m reading the textbooks by Tanenbaum and the Deitels.
Reading
Harvey Deitel, Paul Deitel, David Choffnes
The first volume of the Deitels’ textbook: the hardware and software environment of an OS, processes and threads, asynchronous concurrent execution, mutual exclusion, deadlocks, processor scheduling, real and virtual memory.
Studying
CMC MSU
A discipline of the “AI Systems Developer” program at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University. Studying it now. Python as the main language for AI systems: from how the language and standard library work to developing and maintaining applications.
Reading
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Herbert Bos
The classic textbook on how operating systems work: processes and threads, memory management, file systems, input/output, deadlocks, virtualization, multiprocessor systems and security. At the end, Linux, Android and Windows are examined.
Studying
CMC MSU
A discipline of the “AI Systems Developer” program at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University. Studying it now. The mathematical foundation of computer science: sets and relations, logic, combinatorics and graphs — what algorithms, databases and models are built on.
Reading
James Martin
A 1970s classic on how databases work inside. Martin separates the logical organization of data — how programs see it — from the physical — how it lies on disk — and covers hierarchical, network and relational structures, indexes, hashing, inverted files and data protection.
Reading
Kelly McGonigal
A book based on “The Science of Willpower”, the course Kelly McGonigal teaches at Stanford. She divides self-control into three powers — “I will”, “I won’t” and “I want” — and uses research to explain why we lapse and procrastinate and how to fix it.
Reading
Georgy Chelpanov
A classic school textbook of formal logic used for decades. Brief and rigorous: concepts and definitions, judgments, syllogisms, induction, analogy, hypothesis and proof, logical fallacies.
Reading
William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente
A book based on the film What the Bleep Do We Know!?: physicists, neuroscientists and spiritual teachers reflect on quantum physics, the workings of the brain and the perception of reality. The main question is how far our view of the world is determined by habits of thinking and whether it can be changed.
All: 12 shown
Finished
Fan Wenjie, Li Jianchao, Yan Xiaofan, Zhang Bin
A book about vibe coding, development in which a human states the goal and AI writes the code. The authors trace the path from machine code and no-code platforms to LLMs and review the ecosystem: chatting with a model, AI in the IDE and agents that carry a task from start to finish. The practical part covers prompts and Cursor setup, product requirements, review of AI-written code, and an end-to-end example: a backend, a web interface and deployment via GitHub Actions. The last chapter is about the limits of the approach and the skills a developer needs now.
Finished
Bruce Schneier
A book about how people and organizations exploit loopholes in rules: taxes, laws, markets, platforms. For Schneier, a hack is an action the system formally allows but that subverts its intent. For AI development, the key part of the book is the chapter on AI: a model given a narrow goal finds “legal” workarounds by itself and meets the metric while breaking the point of the task.
Finished
D. M. Koltsov
A Python workbook: language basics, object-oriented programming and metaprogramming. Minimal theory: every topic is covered through examples you can run and modify.
Finished
Robert C. Martin
A book about what distinguishes a professional developer from someone who can just write code: responsibility for the result, the ability to say “no”, honest estimates, tests and constant practice. Martin goes through his own mistakes over decades of his career, from missed deadlines to projects he shouldn’t have taken.
Finished
Alexey Vasiliev
A JavaScript textbook for web development from scratch: from variables and functions to objects, OOP, events and working with page elements. Each topic comes with worked examples and the author’s explanations.
Finished
Alexey Vasiliev
A PHP textbook from syntax basics to object-oriented programming. Each topic is covered with code examples and explanations, with exercises for self-testing at the end of the chapters.
Finished
Alexey Vasiliev
A Python textbook from syntax to working with different data types, classes and threads. Each topic comes with worked examples and exercises to check what you’ve learned.
Exam passed
CMC MSU
A discipline of the “AI Systems Developer” program at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University. Exam passed. The course is about storing data reliably and finding it quickly: the relational model and SQL, schema design and normalization, indexes, transactions and concurrent access.
Finished
John Little
John Little retells Bruce Lee’s philosophy in plain language and shows how to apply martial arts principles in everyday life: at work, in relationships and in arguments with yourself. It’s rooted in Taoism and Zen: flexibility instead of rigid rules, attention to the present moment and honesty with yourself.
Finished
Bruce Lee
A collection of Bruce Lee’s essays, letters and notes on philosophy, martial arts and self-knowledge, compiled by John Little. Here Lee explains why he abandoned styles and arrived at Jeet Kune Do, the “style of no style”. The main idea is on the cover: a teacher doesn’t hand out ready-made truth, they only help you explore yourself.
Finished
George S. Clason
Parables about the people of ancient Babylon that hide simple rules for handling money. A moneylender, a camel trader, a scribe and merchants take turns explaining how to save, not lose and multiply.
Finished
Gleb Arkhangelsky, Olga Strelkova
A short practical guide to remote work by time management specialists. The book came out in spring 2020, when offices were moving to remote work en masse. Inside: how to organize your workspace and day, avoid burning out at home, stay in touch with the team and manage remote employees.
