Slashdot Mirror
Geek Books as Holiday Gifts
Sybelius writes "Wired News is running a story that recommends a half dozen good books as holiday gifts. It's a much more inspired list than the one recently offered by Amazon. According to the reviewer, the books chosen are ones that 'any techno-loving, systems-tinkering, hardware-hacking person would love, but that even those who can't program the clock on their VCR will find quite readable.' Do Slashdot readers have any other recommendations for titles that fit this requirement?"
Give them a subscription to Safari.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
The Art of Computer Programming (Donald Knuth) and the dragon book on compilers of course (I'm reading the first and I will buy the second in a few days). If you don't like mathematics, a good book on functional programming will make your brain all warm inside!
If you surf too fast through a book they will warn you that a bot may be reading the webpages and they may cancel your account if it happens too often.
Get them a good piece of geek fiction. Hitchhiker's Guide, LOTR, Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, etc.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
If you've got someone who has already read Adam's extremely small collection of works (including HHGTG and the Dirk Gently books, his "we picked up all the clippings of stuff he wrote and put it into a book," and "Starship Titanic" based on his video game), then they might also like Terry Pratchett's books.
He tells a ripping good yarn, almost all parodies, usually insightful, and always funny. His most famous series is the Discworld books, of which there are 30 or so.
Reading through these books my favorite author slowly switched from Douglas to Pratchett. The humor style is almost the same, but Pratchett's a little more optimistic about the nature of life, which I find refreshing.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Wil Wheaton... Great gift for geeks and non-geeks...
I want The LaTeX Companion by Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al. LaTeX is a seriously cool piece of software for text publishing -- and far from easy to use, if you want to exploit its full potential (it's not difficult to produce simple but good looking documents, that's almost automagic). From what I've heard, this book is among the best on the subject. Too bad the title makes it sound like a condom.
So Santa, if you read this: Please, please, please!
Not sure if this qualifies as a GEEK book per se, but Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos are excellent qualitative descriptions of modern physics. You won't be able to solve any physics problems after reading them but pretty much anyone can at least gain some insight into how physicists think the world works.
A little heavy on the analogies (IMO) but overall I'd say Greene is more eloquent and clear than Hawking.
She can't be that big of a geek if she didn't already own them. BTW, the reason that set is so cheap is because it's missing the fifth volume: Mostly Harmless.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
NOTE: blatant self promotion.
I maintain a list of books and other resources for all sorts of people who work in the software development field including of course, programmers, managers, executives, testers, etc.
Software Resources
The list is heavily weighted towards Agile software development.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.