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Your Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books?
chris_eineke writes "I like to read and to collect good books related to computer science. I'm talking about stuff like the classic textbooks (Introduction to Algorithms 2nd ed., Tanenbaum's Operating Systems series) and practitioners' books (The Practice of Programming, Code Complete) and all-around excellent books (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Practical Common Lisp). What's your stocking-stuffer book this Christmas? What books have been sitting on your shelves that you think are the best ones of their kind? Which ones do you think are -1 Overrated? (All links are referral-free.)"
(personally, I think it's overrated, but I'm still proud to own the set).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Awesome book.
http://www.amazon.com/Switching-Power-Supply-Design-3rd/dp/0071482725/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230057542&sr=8-2
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
The first few chapters of Code will turn you from a know-nothing cubscout into a 2nd-year electrical engineering major within an afternoon. The book scales from understanding morse code to binary to logic gates to flipflops to RAM to assembler to constructing your own bios and operating systems with nothing but a hearty supply of semiconductors, batteries, plywood, wire, and solder, if you wanted to. The jumps between one level and another are made so they appear completely contiguous. It helps a CS student understand how software can truly run on hardware (instead of just looking at the magic boxes and saying "DO AS I SAY, PATHETIC PROCESSOR!")
I've never read a book that taught me so much in so few words so fluidly. I picked it up in a Barnes and Noble for like $20 (Skeptical from the logo on the back) and have never been so pleasantly surprised with a dead tree.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Introduction To Algorithms 2nd Edition was by far the most useful book I've ever delved into. Back in the olden days when I was stuck coding in a borrowed copy of QuickBASIC, I developed one helluva binary search routine that could search through about 50,000 records in tolerable time on an PC-XT, and that book saved my ass.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Then let me reply directly (read: a poor excuse to top-post).
Michael Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation." It's easily the best textbook I've ever owned, and had me paging through it well ahead of the pace of the course. It of course doesn't serve nearly the same purpose as K&R and all those other books on practical topics, but for someone who's never been exposed to the theoretical side of CS, it's a wonderful eye-opener.
Apparently the same opinions are shared by most of the other CS students I've talked to.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
I agree completely. Aside from language reference books (a dime-a-dozen) and the web, I primarily use Mathematics texts books as my primary reference works. Lattice and Category theory are very helpful for understanding database design and algorithms -- an inner join on database tables is join of "sub-tables" in the Dedekind-MacLane completion of the lattice of "sub-tables", for example.
Combinatorics are helpful when analyzing algorithms in general. Category theory and some first order logic (quantifying over categories) gives you a sound and rich theory of types (or you can develop an equivalent one in about a million different ways). Never mind the domain specific problems I've worked on, including statistical analyses of large amounts of data.
For most computing domains, a CS degree is overrated. A Mathematics degree gets you 90% of the way there, and gives you so much more.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Here's a criticism of that book from its own author: it supports the illusion that all you need to secure a system is the right technology.
Without doubt Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg It had me gripped in a way that no programming book could have :-)
GoF --> -1 Overrated. Not because of the book, but because of most of the idiots who didn't conceptually understand the applications after reading. Half the people who try to talk in patterns don't understand the difference between Command, Visitor, Chain of Responsibility, etc. They understand Singleton, and that's it. Of the people who can talk in patterns, a good 50% don't really know how to appropriately use them together in system and software architecture. Meaning, at best, 1 in 4 of those who reference GoF patterns are actually using the work to help in communication and design.
I think it's probably an important book in the history of Software Engineering (not to be confused with CS). The book unfortunately spawned at much bad design as it did elegance.