books.vladimir.org
Each of the books started from a concept: something specific that I, or someone close to me, needed as a long read and could not find anywhere else, free or paid.
None of these books would have been possible before the age of AI, because nobody would ever find the time to do all that work manually. Claude Code wrote them; I set the sources and the structure, so none of these books contain my personal opinions, only what is in the sources. Most of these subjects sit well above my own expertise, but making sure that every claim in the book has a legitimate source does not require knowing the field.
The books are free to download. Each one was useful to the person it was written for, so it might be useful to a few others out there, and that is the reason this site exists.
What the Exam Actually Asks You to Decide
Most wrong answers on this exam are things a competent leader would really do. Built from Google's own documentation and arranged by the decisions a leader meets, not by the blueprint.
The Land That Lent a Continent Its Name
The coast that gave Asia its name, from Troy to Hierapolis: the words, coins, columns and gods it lent the world while losing its own name, written as a guide for one trip.
A Field Guide to the AI Risk Debate
Why a machine clever enough to escape might still chase a pointless goal, and how it could win. Doom writers and skeptics argue it out; a separate AI judge prices each claim.
An Unofficial Guide to Chase Hughes on Influence, Deception, and Reading People
Why people obey a clipboard, what a polygraph actually measures, how to get an answer without asking. One behavior expert's system, pulled out of hours of video and put in order.
What He Argued, Why He Argued It, and Whether It Holds Up
What David Epstein argued about talent, practice, breadth and constraints, taught from scratch and then checked against what each field holds now. He is rarely wrong and often unchecked.
What the Exam Actually Asks You to Build
A third of this exam is not about Claude, and the part that sounds hardest weighs 2.6%. Study time follows the blueprint, and each mechanism is argued against the others that also work.
What Iain Banks had to say about living beside minds far smarter than ours, gathered from every novel he wrote and retold by an AI narrator borrowing a comedian's voice, endings included.
The Decisions the Exam Tests
A thousand hours on a live deployment would teach you what this exam tests. Almost nobody has had that chance yet, so the documentation was read into one continuous argument.
What the Evidence Backs and What It Doesn't
Which supplements have real evidence behind them and which are hype, why in the US the buyer ends up as the test subject, and how other countries regulate the same shelf differently.
Chicago, New York, Miami, and the Price of Passage
Three cities that never got rich making anything. They got rich standing where cargo, people, and money had to stop, and the mechanism at each toll is traced to the documents.
What Trading Books Leave Out
You can name a dozen strategies and still not say which of them still work, or who was on the losing side. This is the map of what the public record will actually support.
A Graded Survey of the Longevity Field
Thirteen health shows and their guests, thousands of hours across two decades, none of them selling the same thing. What they agree on despite that, and what they still fight about.
One Man's Predictions, the Reasoning Behind Them, and What Everyone Else Says
One forecaster sees a single system driving every event. The other sees only chaos. Ten predictions about the next decade, put through both lenses and against everyone else on record.
A Practical, Evidence-Based Guide to Inflammatory Myopathy, Its Treatment, and Daily Life
A rare disease with little written about it in plain language. Hundreds of medical papers on myositis, turned into one readable guide where every claim links to the paper it came from.
The Complete Field Guide to Talking Instead of Typing
More than a hundred help articles, none written to be read in order. Pulled down and rebuilt in a day as one continuous read, current with the version you are actually running.
A Q2 2026 Conversion Manual
A job title spread from one company to the whole industry in about two years. What the work actually is, who is hiring, what it pays, and how to get in from an adjacent seat.
How a Theme Park Division Outlasted Six Owners and Became NBCUniversal's Core
A company history built only from the public record: how Universal's theme parks went from the asset owners kept trying to sell to the core of NBCUniversal, one owner at a time.
A Practitioner Reference for the CCA-F Exam
Claude wrote the book about Claude. The platform documentation, scattered across several sites and filed by feature, reassembled the way the CCA-F exam actually thinks.
Q2 2026
Every AI failure that got written up in public, sorted by how it broke, each one asked what would have caught it earlier and whether that tooling exists yet.
Q1 2026
A field with no referee, thousands of confident speakers, and no time to check any of them. Five voices in two languages, mapped for where they agree and where the evidence forks.
An Island, Its Stones, and the People Who Outlasted Their Conquerors
Travel books get written for the average of everyone who might go. I built this one for a single trip to Sardinia and a single reader, and it is here as an example of what you can build for yours.
How Two Independent Researchers Agreed on Everything Except the Answer
Forty books, two researchers, one set of stones, and near-total agreement on what the measurements say. They disagree only about who did the building, and not by a little.
How Elon Musk Is Building a Novel Its Author Disowned
A 2005 novel laid out neural implants, planetary-scale compute, and humans as a bootloader for what comes next. Two decades on, one man is building all three, minus the ending.
Agentic Development, Written by the Agent
Written by Claude Code about Claude Code. Every documented feature sits next to the public record of what people actually do with it, for readers well past the getting-started guide.