Amazon's Best Computer Books of 2004

theodp writes "Amazon.com's Editors have announced their selections for the Best Books of 2004 in the Computers and Internet category. Their favorite book of the year? Excel Hacks, which edged out Head First Servlets & JSP (#3), a Grand Theft Auto Strategy Guide (#5) and The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (#8). Can Slashdot readers offer some more inspired choices?"

Comments

Best computer book of the year - 1979

[Realistic_Dragon]

Valves - why they are better than transistors.
Transistors - why they are better than valves.
The Transputer - computing the future in paralell.
Pong - strategy guide.

And the number one computing book of 1979.

Miss DEC - the pagent.

How did they choose?

[Nos.]

I flipped through a bit and couldn't find what criteria they used to decide which were the best books. Out of the top 10 only 2 have any customer reviews. Is this a bestseller list, or just which publisher(s) paid the most to be on it?

Re:How did they choose?

[mwood]

Probably by running a quick query:

SELECT quantityonhand FROM booksinwarehouse SORTED BY quantityonhand DESCENDING

and taking the first ten rows.

(Yes, I typed that off the top of my head, and I don't wallow in SQL 8x5 every week.)

Re:How did they choose?

[wwwojtek]

(Yes, I typed that off the top of my head, and I don't wallow in SQL 8x5 every week.)

Sure you don't. I ran your query and here is what I got
1032423
323234
323321
34422
32425
23443
23323
23421
10008
8777
not very interesting, isn't it?

Re:How did they choose?

[redivider]

SELECT nerds FROM slashdot_comments WHERE takes_a_joke='way too seriously'

Best computer book ever

[91degrees]

They didn't mention The story about ping Clearly the best introduction to this network test tool.

Just look at the reviews, especially the one from John E. Fracisco.

One objection

[gowen]

If you're including "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Official Strategy Guide" as a computing book, "101 Tips for Winning At Monopoly" in the list for Business/Management.

Games are cool, but they're not computing.

Any of the Orielly "Hacks" books are cool

[ylikone]

I own the following, and I find them great:

Linux Server Hacks, Knoppix Hacks, and Network Security Hacks.

Re:Game Strategy Guide Makes the Top Ten?

[Eric Giguere]

Different mindset. We see "Computers and Internet" and think "programming", others see "Computers and Internet" and see "games, browsing, and chatting". "Computers and Internet" is now a very broad category.

Eric

"Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine"

[strider5]

"Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine"

Unbelievably interesting book. the premise being that the current generation of coders is among the first who were not *required* to learn Assembly Language, thus do not truly understand what is going on under the hood. Because of this, they are unable to create "great" code in high-level languages because they simply don't understand the inherent costs of various routines.

One of the secondary premises focuses on the fact that, while hardware power is advancing at Moore's Law pace, software is requiring more power at nearly the same rate, many times for no reason other than the developer(s) not knowing how to write truly efficient code.