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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!)"
goedel escher bach d:
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
...do you group your books by color or by topic? Especially the O'Reilly books... does the Sendmail one go in your "mail server" books? Does the pink Python book go next to the pink CVS book or next to the red and white Ruby book? Decisions decisions!
Nice to see that he's got his Knuths... although, if he's like me, they get opened about twice a year.
The Army reading list
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederik Brooks (clicky) has some very good insights which still hold true (the book was originally published in 1975).
It's hard to be specific when "a programmer" could write in a number of languages. Regardless, just about anything from O'Reilly is well worth the shelf space. I still have my original copy of "The Whole Internet"!
GEB is simply amazing and really makes you think. It is a large tome but it was well worth the read when I read it in high school. It influenced me musically, mathematically and gave me insight to become a computer programmer.
It's a very common book and can be acquired cheaply on amazon, ebay and the wiki.
I also heavily recommend getting to know this site if you're willing to search through lists of books for good deals.
My work here is dung.
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.
Aside from Knuth, which is more showing off than anything (not that the guy isn't a genius), one of the best algorithms books is Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein. I'd generally suggest algorithms over language-specific references, although modern class libraries tend to implement the best ones already.
Other than that, I suppose your favourite collection of O'Reilly titles. I find Java in a Nutshell useful, as I prefer the dead-tree version to the online documentation. Many of the books on the webpage are language or library references, which are good, but very dependent on the programmer's interests.
Dilbert books are always good, of course.
Personally, I like the head first series (head first java and head first EJB) a lot. :-)
Those books are entertaining and educating at the same time. An ideal Christmas present for yourself
--Use ant to make
C++: The Complete Reference by Herbert Schildt & Thinking in C++: by Bruce Eckel.
In my opinion, the best c++ books out there.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
A stash of porn magazines.
Programmers? Hardware hackers? Gamers? Gadget geeks?
0 3/qid=1134394525/sr=8-8/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i8_xgl/202- 6834711-0899839
..or maybe even "Open Source Game Programming: Qt Games for KDE, PDA's and Windows":6 4/qid=1134395013/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_11_3/202-6834711- 0899839
/ 0429213&tid=222&tid=6&tid=3
If your friends are into 3D programming or game development, I recommend some books about OpenGL.
I know I want this one, "OpenGL Game Programming":
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/07615333
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/15845040
If your friends are into hardware hacking, I recommend "Apple I Replica Creation":
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/03
I own this book myself and it's pretty cool, it covers almost all the DIY basics for building an 8-bit computer. How cool is that?
And ofcourse, for the gadget freaks you have ThinkGeek and Nerdorama..
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
Let me second Code Complete. That one should be on that shelf.
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.
... a book like "how do I protect my website from being slashdotted" :-)
A book that is really missing on this bookshelf is found on http://www.antipatterns.com/, really the definitive guide to learn from others' mistakes. O well, not always only others.
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 don't have anything on my bookshelf. I use google to find programming resources. This saves me from piling up books on very old technologies. It is also easier to search a web site than it is to load the Book On CD and search that.
While I have several books, I feel the same way. I'm highly suspicious when I walk into a developer's office and see the two dozen ".NET" books on the shelf, the spines giving all appearances of never being violated. This is pretty much par for the course, though : Stock your bookshelf to give the appearance of a professional, when in reality it's just filler that is very unlikely to have ever been read.
Indeed even many of the "classics" fall under this umbrella. The Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, and Code Complete are fantastic books, and everyone and their brother lauds them, yet if you talk to people you discover that, overwhelmingly, they haven't actually read them: It's just a meme to these people to talk about how great those books are. [Note: They ARE great books. Well, the MMM could have been condensed into a blog entry with little loss of value, and Peopleware could easily have been turned into a couple of blog entries, but nonetheless]
Sidenote: Many Microsoft Press books come with a CD with an electronic copy of the book for searching and electronic access, as well as sample and promo material. Of course most developers wouldn't know this because they never actually cracked it open.
Joel on Software posted a very useful book list, which extends more to the management of programming than to any specific language. This makes it more generally useful than yet another C book.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
Elements of Programming Style
Code Complete
Software Project Survival Guide
Society of Mind
The Tao that can be spoken is not the one eternal Tao
Always a good idea to check the book review at ACCU before you buy any book. The reviewers here are mostly experts in the subject matter.
and give them a subscription to O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf.
A lot more adventure and excitement than I had expected. Also gives a different (sometimes flattering sometimes not) of Apple, Atari and Radio Shack.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The New Turing Omnibus : Sixty-Six Excursions in Computer Science?
A collection of essays about computer science, not programming. Very interesting and highly reccomended.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
You do know that books had Indices before databases, right?
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
This book is on my shelf and is a must read for anybody working in tech.
It is not a technical book. It is a non-fiction novel about a team of engineers building a mini-computer back in the early 1980s. The book might be 25 years out of date from the technical point of view, but few books capture the essence of the engineer's mind and commitment as well as this one does.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Some treasures on my shelf:
D. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming (Volumes 1-3)
D. Berlinski, A Tour of the Calculus
D. Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm
G. Polya, How to Solve It
P. Beckmann, A History of Pi
G. Lakoff & R. Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From
Aho & Ullman, Principles of Compiler Design (1st Ed.)
Aho & Sethi & Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
P. Freiberger & M. Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer
H. Sheldon, Boyd's Introduction to the Study of Disease
C. Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Anyone of these would have made a good gift for me -- and I'm sure other geeks would appreciate these as well. That is, if they don't own them already.
On a related note: The conference proceedings from the ACM SIGCSE add quite a bit to my library every year. The membership is very affordable and makes an excellent gift (provided, of course, that the geek in question is not already a member of the ACM). I'm not sure about the other SIGs, but you certainly get your dues worth out of SIGCSE.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
While MSDN and online tutorials are fine for solving the very specific problems they address, they do nothing to teach you of programming philosphy or design in general. An application is more than a collection of code samples pasted together. That's more of a car wreck than an application. If you ever want to graduate beyond writing one-off tools to writing applications that other programmers will have to maintain in the future, you really should pick up a book. Besides, reading a book while compiling doesn't waste any CPU cycles.
I can't believe that in all this discussion no one has even mentioned the site "Book Pool" http://www.bookpool.com/ . This site is one of the most extensive places to purchase any computer books. I'd highly sugest browsing around there if you want to buy new books for a geek.
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
Code Complete by Steve McConnell
The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks
The are a few off the top of my head that any programmer should read. I'm sure there are a few others. Most things after that are probably specific to certain areas and interests.
I recommend a Safari subscription. It provides online access to everthing by O'Reilly and a number of other publishers. My subscription has saved me huge amounts of time, since I can search and find useful information on all sorts of topics without leaving my desk.
I highly recommend this book for the part about computation alone (there are 5 parts in the book). In the computational part it covers number systems, infinity, and computability and incomputability. Then the rest of the book is gravy for a geek: fractals, chaos, complex systems, and adaptation (genetic algorithms and neural networks). It's the kind of book that gives you a framework to hang the rest of your knowledge on. Seriously, get it.
Shh.
Neither of these I would recommend in general, but they are both excellent books if you are dealing with the subject matter they discuss. They are both enjoyable reads and extremely useful.
Inside the C++ Object Model by Stanley B. Lippman. Lippman is one of the original authors of CFront (along with Stroustrup), the original C++ compiler which worked by translating C++ into C. This book explains how every C++ feature is implmented by the compiler: virtual functions, multiple inheritence, in-memory object layout, etc. If you are working on projects where the overhead of a pointer de-reference or virtual function call may be too much, then this book is a must read. Even if that doesn't describe you, this is still a suprisingly enjoyable read and will almost certainly help you at any job interviews for C++ programming positions.
Hackers Delight by Henry S. Warren Jr. This deals entirely with efficient bit twiddling. It has chapters on counting the bits set in a word, finding the first set bit, quick integer square root approximations, etc. Unless you're working with embedded systems or otherwise need assembly-level optimizations, this book just serves to obfuscate your code. On the other hand, it's quite a fun challenge to try to figure out the algorithms without reading the explanations.
History of My Life (Volumes I & II)
U.S.S.
Body Language Secrets: A Guide During Courtship & Dating
The System: How to Get Laid Today!
Everything else can be looked up on the internet.
Sun Tzu - The Art of War (here) and Machiavelli - The Prince (here) are examples of books which have some applicability in the workplace of today.
Both have the full texts available from the wikipedia links above.
Probably the kind that are all stuck together...
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx
>>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!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I really like Linux Administration Handbook by Nemeth, Snyder, and Hein. It is quite comprehensive and detailed, not to mention enjoyable to read. My copy is well-used, indeed. For any hobbyist who runs a linux box at home and is interested in the actual nuts and bolts of the system, rather than just the graphical configuration tools provided by (some) distros, it would be a welcome gift, I think. I used to just google around for online documentation until I came across this excellent reference, which is now the first place I turn.
I think that buying a programming reference for a person who programs for a living would not be such a good idea. But buying something related to a person's out-of-work (or out-of-school) computer interests is a nice gift.
TAOCP, while it may give you some good nerd karma, is pretty much useless for day to day programming. It is far too dense, and there are better books on algorithms out there for practical usage. Most people I know with it on their shelf have not made it past Chapter 2, if they even really made an attempt to read it at all. It looks nice up there, but I don't think it is all that usefull.
Hmmm. The obvious answers:
Knuth.
Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming.
George Polya, How to Solve It.
Gries, The Science of Programming.
Bentley, Programming Pearls.
Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides, Design Patterns.
Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Hunt and Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer.
Hmmm. My own bookshelf is lacking. Time to shop...
I had to read The Fountainhead for English in high school and I have decidedly mixed feelings. On one hand, it was interesting to read from an architectural perspective. The characters, on the other hand, exist not as people but as archetypes. But then again, that's the case in almost all of Ayn Rand's literature. We're currently in rehearsal for The Night of January 16th and some of the rhetoric she has characters spew out... I wasn't altogether kosher on the glorification of Roark's rape of Dominique.
Another good book (good series, actually) is the Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman. In my opinion, it's an excellent example of building a fantasy world which has a rational reasoning for magic working and not technology.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
As an aside my [older] translation begins with "I am a sick man... an angry man... an unattractive man. For whatever reason the newer translation substitutes wicked for angry. Perhaps someone who understands more Russian would know why.
The Russian word is zloy, which can be translated both as wicked and angry among others. Dostoevsky uses zloy a lot, so the choice is quite significant. I don't know English enough to advise the best choice though.
Debugging by Dave Agans: universal, often neglected principles to avoid long debugging cycles. Illustrated with interesting war stories and amusing anecdotes. This is one you'll actually read all the way through. Called a classic by several reviewers, including IEEE SW and Dr. Dobbs.h tml, and is endorsed on the back cover by Rob Malda. (Disclaimer: I wrote it.)
It was reviewed on Slashdot http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/02/21/228241.s
You can get it on Amazon but they sold out this week, so for Christmas you'd have to go Barnes and Noble and pay a bit more.
Oh, and it's cheap ($15 on Amazon, $22 on B&N) but well worth the money.
See http://www.debuggingrules.com/ for info, samples, free poster, etc.
"Debugging" by Dave Agans - the perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer.
I've seen numerous postings regarding the GOF Patterns book which no programmer's bookshelf should be without. One book I've also enjoyed reading and might be useful for other developers especially if you inherit someone's else's programming mess is "AntiPatterns".
/ theantipatterngr/103-3030967-9900659
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130
"...do you group your books by color or by topic? Especially the O'Reilly books... does the Sendmail one go in your "mail server" books? Does the pink Python book go next to the pink CVS book or next to the red and white Ruby book? Decisions decisions!" As a truly tragic geek, I order mine (using spine colour) by the electromagnetic spectrum. So Programming PHP (green) goes before Programming Perl (blue), etc.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
As has already been noted, books on particular technologies/languages/etc tend to go out of date pretty quickly, although even some of those are well-written enough to be timeless. I have a lot of computer books; if I had to whittle my collection down to those I viewed as most important, it would probably look something like:
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson & Sussman)
The New Hacker's Dictionary (Raymond)
Selected Papers on Computer Science (Knuth)
Database-Backed Websites (Greenspun)
Programming Pearls (Bentley)
The C Programming Language (K&R)
Algorithms (Cormen et al) --OR-- The Art of Computer Programming series (Knuth)
Essentials of Programming Languages (Friedman et al)
The Little Schemer (Friedman & Felliesen)
This last book is perhaps one of the most elegantly simple, yet profound books I've ever read. Even though it is not as comprehensive as, say, SICP, this is probably my favorite computer science book, because it's such a joy to read and it truly expands your thinking.
Those books, combined with online or printed language/API manuals, would make a great foundational library for a programmer.