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.