Ask Slashdot: Books for a Comp Sci Graduate Student?

peetm (781139) writes "Having visited with me and my wife recently, the girlfriend of an ex-student of mine (now taking an M.Sc. in pure CS) asked me to suggest useful books for her boyfriend: '... He recently mentioned that he would love to have a home library, like the one you have, with variety of good, useful and must-have books from different authors. ... Mostly, I was thinking your advice would be priceless when it comes to computer science related books, but .. I would appreciate any sort of advice on books from you. ...' Whilst I could scan my own library for ideas, I doubt that I'm really that 'current' with what's good, or whether my favorites would be appropriate: I've not taught on the M.Sc. course for a while, and in some cases, and just given their price, I shouldn't really recommend such books that are just pet loves of mine — especially to someone who doesn't know whether they'd even be useful.

And, before you ask: YES, we do have a reading list, but given that he'll receive this as part of this course requirement anyway, I'd like to tease readers to suggest good reads around the periphery of the subject." I'll throw out Pierce's Types and Programming Languages (and probably Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages ), and Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures .

Comments

Re:knuth's art of computer programming

[Animats]

They're kind of dated, because few people do sorts and list manipulation at that level any more. I have both an original edition and a current edition of vols. 1-3, but haven't looked at them in years.

Some non-Knuth suggestions

[Stephan Schulz]

• The Dragon Book"
  Compiler construction teaches many different aspects of computer science, and this is a classic.
• Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
  One of the best-written technical books, ever. On the practical side, but doing useful things (tm) is not illegal in computer science.
• Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation
  A good introduction to the fundamentals of theoretical computer science.
• Any good bible on the language of choice, e.g. The C Programming Language for old farts like me, or Common Lisp the Language.