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?"

Comments

Re:Books? That's so 2003!

[wk633]

or ACM (www.acm.org) which includes a pretty good online libary. Not as complete as Safari, but a pretty good deal for $99/year.

Re:Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C

[fireboy1919]

I wasn't aware that there was anyone who actually felt that three dimensional discrete calculus and C programming are both less difficult to understand than a VCR.

Go you!

But if you're going there, why not go ahead and get the master work on algorithms, Numerical Recipes, which is now available in C,C++, and Fortran versions. This, just like your suggestion, is hardcore programmers brainfood, not fluff.

For softer stuff, may I suggest O'Reilly books about scripting languages? It doesn't really matter which one. Pick one. Ruby, perl, python, etc. They give a good introduction to modern programming libraries, while not getting the newbie bogged down in having to write algorithms that are more complicated than they can deal with.

Off the top of my Brain..

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything by Terry Pratchett!

His Discworld Series, or the Book Good Omens.

What about the classics?

[meganthom]

Asimov (maybe I Robot would be a good choice with the crappy movie out), Stephenson, Gibson, Nevin, etc.

I just started reading Ringworld, and I absolutely love it.

For the physicist/chemist/engineer in your life, I'd recommend the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. It's a great reference, and a book we would rarely buy for ourselves...

Re:Harry Potter

[miyako]

Actually, I'd second this. I spent a lot of time resisting the pressure to read the Harry Potter books, but I finally broke down and borrowed the first book from a friend of mine, and I have to say that now I have the entire series of books, and found them all to be quite enjoyable.
While the reading level of the books is certainly going to be low, and not present much of a challenge to adult readers, JK Rowling manages to do an amazing job of creating a great story and an immersive world with the limited complexity of the language that she uses. In fact, this is one of the nice things about this series, it's a very easy and at the same time engrossing read, so I can get through a book relatively fast. There is also a lot of very subtle humor in the books, especially the laters ones once the series was proving popular to adults as well as kids, that is clearly targeted at an older audience.
These books are especially good for people with kids, because it is one of the few book series that the parents and the kids can equally enjoy.