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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.
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.
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" :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.