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A Programmer's Bookshelf
An anonymous reader writes "With christmas just round the corner I have been looking for gifts for my geek friends. But what book? I recently found a simple page with one person's bookshelf and explain what's good and what's not. What do you think? Whats on a programmer's bookshelf? (or what should be and is not!)"
Just because your friend is a geek does not mean a book is the best gift! Picking tech books can be difficult. You need to know what your friend is interested in. If your friend knows the topic a book covers, it won't be useful. If the book is outside the scope of what your friend does, the book won't get used. Even within a language, there are so many topics that just because you hit the right language, does not mean the book would be useful. If you want to get a book, but a cheap $7 trashy novel that will be filled with laughs, and add a $50 gift card at your local bookstore. That will probably be cheaper than some of the $70 books out there. The cool thing about giving the $7 novel is you're giving a piece of yourself. It should be a book that made you laugh and think. I'd suggest Catch-22. It will provide lots of laugh out loud moments. You should pick a book you liked and want to share with your friend.
Christmas is not about gifts or materialism. Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Christ. Spend time with your friends, listen to how their life is, their year. Celebrate with them. Be happy. That is the greatest gift you can give. People don't need more objects. People need to feel loved.
Godel, Escher and Bach is a damned good book, and any self-respecting geek should have read it. Twice.
Other favourites include Capital by Marx, Crime & Punishment by Dostoeyevsky, Also Spracht Zarathustra (Nietzsche), The Fountainhead (Rand), The heart of a dog (Bulgakov) and Dubliners (Joyce).
If you're a programmer, the last thing you're going to want to read are code books.
I'm just a budding programmer, so my bookshelf is fairly skimpy (5-6 books -- mostly accumulated from class). However it seems to me that you're best to buy books that won't be dated as quickly, such as those that are more conceptual (e.g. design patterns, cookbooks, and Art of Programming type books). For everything else, O'Reilly Safari digital book collections are the way to go. I've found it has taken a little time to get used to not reading books on dead trees, but the convenience pays off.
> Every good programmer loves garfield?
I assume the article writer was asking a question. The answer is no.
I find lo-tech paper books aren't costworthy in today's tech environment - they go out of date too quickly, and are thus resource wasteful (In my area - web tech - anyway). Any reference books I buy in digital form, as this is usually more cost-efficient.
So for a REAL bookshelf... probably some IT-angled fiction. This is tricky as most authors fail to research tech angles correctly (like Hollywood computers, but not quite as glaringly obvious). Douglas Copeland's Microserfs was OK, and quite entertaining.
For an intelligent recommended read though, I can't recommend the usual Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance highly enough. It really makes you think, which is nice. I've been meaning to check out Scott Adam's (of Dilbert fame) God's Debris too. That's free to download by the way. So it might be worth reading a bit and if you like it, you could buy paper copies for your friends.
>>Remember, it is the thought that counts. The gift is not important. What is important is someone cares about you.>>
I wish people wouldn't waste money buying me gifts. If they spent five minutes talking to me about something they know I am really interested in, that would be worth far more. The "thought" that counts is a respect for a person. Giving wine to someone who never drinks it, giving lingerie to your wife (instead of asking for her wearing it as *your* present), giving a CD of music reflecting your religion to a couple of atheists, giving candles or "zen rock gardens" to people who aren't interested, checking off the names on a list, that ain't "the thought that counts"-- it's the thought that adds useless junk to an already crowded home!
I've made the mistake myself in the past. These days I beg people not to give me gifts and (because my wife loves Christmas so much) I put in effort getting stuff for her that reflects her interests, even when I don't like the stuff.
Everyone else, just give money to charity!
More importantly a copy of K&R should be in every programing book authors shelf.
the clear writing style and tidy code snippets are an example to all.
Exactly and I wish other writers could emulate that approach rather than trying to write as many pages as possible. Take any C++ book and compare the section about the basic datatypes to K&R, usually 5 to 10 times the number of pages and K&R are still easier to understand.
And it's not only programming books, you find the similar style in other fields of science too. And it's rather consistent, making me believe that most American publishers of technical books pays their authors at a per page ratio.
Well of course it's worth its shelf space. The thing is about a third of an inch thick!
For those just tuning in, "K&R" is shorthand for Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language," and it really is a great little book. However, part of the brevity and clarity comes from the C programming language itself. Try writing a similar book about C++, and even with the same eye for brevity, you'd end up with a book five or six times as long. Ten times if you threw in the STL.
Some people have claimed that this book should be required reading for programmers. Others have countered that the book should be required for authors of programming books. Let me take it one step further and suggest that it should be required reading for authors of programming languages. If the language you're designing cannot be effectively and similarly summarized given the K&R treatment, then it may be worth it to simplify things.
I've become a huge fan of Python recently. As proponents claim, it's one of a very small handful of languages where you can keep the entire syntax in your head. I'm not claiming that Python is the ideal language, but merely that other programming languages should strive for similar simplicity.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!