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.)"

Comments

Re:Best books?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:My Math Books

[poopdeville]

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.