India actually gives a lot of aid. This one's from 2017: http://www.newindianexpress.co...
The quantum of aid it gives is significantly larger than the aid given it it.
We told the UK and other countries way back to STOP giving aid to us but they begged us to continue taking the aid. So, if your country gives aid to India, please please reach out to your congressmen (or whoever) and tell them to stop giving us aid. We DON'T need it.
Thought I'd answer this one about standing up and showing the world.
Taco Cowboy - We're not in a hurry. I think (as an Indian), being inclusive is far more important and this will help us all succeed together. We still don't have the strength/power to do that today but as you can see, we're building up to it.
Yes, we (especially those of us who have worked outside India) are pretty aware of some of the racist comments - a lot of us have experienced it. But having been born and brought up in an extremely diverse society, we know how to come together to succeed together.
Give us time. One day, we will say yes we can!! (stand together)...
..In particular the Executive that had the entires companies Salary in an XLS document on their hard-drive should be fired immediately..
I have worked at a pretty senior level in a very large and global Software company. Here's roughly how the process of deciding salaries happens.
We make a list of our reportees on a spreadsheet (and an upline manager can have over 300 reportees), add in various parameters and rank them.
Once we've ranked and sync'd up with our managers AND with our peers, the data is uploaded into the salary tool. This is an online tool.
However, we can (and do) download csv files from the tool - including past and proposed salaries since it is so much easier to juggle data in Excel.
The reason I describe this process is - if my (or any of the other managers') machines are hacked while we are making the salary decisions, the hackers will surely get the salary data. The download is necessary since the Salary tool is not as flexible as looking at data in an xls. This is especially true when one is looking at the salary of a very large number of people. This, to my knowledge, is true for most large Organizations and based on your point, most senior managers of the organization hacked would get fired.
Hmmmm... Interesting. here's an Indian (entrepreneural) perspective.
Let me start with a few stories: The founder of Snapdeal http://www.snapdeal.com/ (an India focused ecommerce company) wanted to do a startup in the Valley but didn't get a visa. So he decided to stay back and do his startup in Bangalore. Snapdeal is now valued at ~$10B and is challenging both Amazon & Flipkart here. Their YoY growth is 6x.
Zomato http://www.zomato.com/ started of by consolidating its presence in India and has now gone multi-national (15 countries and expanding). They haven't gone to the US yet.
There are quite a few startups happening here that are focused on India, the rest of AsiaPac & EU regions and a lot of these have just begun to scale. These startups have started taking the cream of the Engg folks who would have otherwise gone to Infosys, Wipro and from there on to the US.
In fact, I know of a couple of headhunters who place US engineers with Indian startups in India. It is a trickle now and I think it would be good to cherry pick the better ones from out there. There are lots of seriously good engineers who we can use.
As an entrepreneur/co-founder myself (of an early stage in the enterprise space), it makes a lot of sense for us to be India and AsiaPac focused - We have a large market that we would convert first. First of all it is so much easier for us to sell in my backyard and then I honestly don't have the time to wade through all the Visa & other issues that the US would throw at us.
The only reason I would consider the US is the size of the market which will be important to me once I've consolidated and have become profitable. The market that is right in front of me (India and then China) is large enough for me to grow to be a fairly large entity.
Honestly, I am unable to comprehend why there's so much racism. The US is known for ensuring racism doesn't happen as compared to a lot of other place.
There have been significant innovations brought to the global space efforts by Mangalyaan. These innovations are the ones that cut the costs of the Mars initiative to $75M.
There have been innovations in planning, management and execution. The key ones have been a strategic focus on component reuse and leveraging other ongoing space missions within ISRO to concurrently complete tasks for Mangalyaan (:-) Isro folks hate the nickname). The whole project was planned in detail and completely schedule driven. Mangalyaan took 18 months from Mission announcement to lift-off. http://www.forbes.com/sites/sa...
The other major innovation was in terms of software modelling & simulation of the entire mission. Physical tests were made redundant on a scale never done before - just one prototype was needed. This cut waste, time & costs significantly.
ISRO chose a longer route but the slingshotting technique paid off in terms of far lesser fuel consumption (thus reducing the weight of the space craft) and yet took approximately the same time as the Maven.
Low manpower costs also helped.
I would think the payoffs to the global space community are in terms of cutting edge techniques developed. Collaboration with the Indian industry have helped build next-gen capability which will pay off in the years to come.
The Mom, a Technology demonstrator is a product of Jugaad or Frugal Engineering. The next mission is scheduled for sometime in 2017-2020. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Bravo!!! So the authors take a wicked problem and find the just one element that solves it. This is intelligence of the highest order. I wonder if they are even aware of the definition of a wicked problem. I guess I have this problem with theoreticians.
Using the authors' logic, then if one were to make everyone healthy in â" say Afghanistan, then that country will have escaped poverty and would get to be on the road to being a developed nation...
It doesn't matter how healthy, productive or motivated the Afghan citizen is. His/Her life is impacted by people coming over their border with a very clear agenda.
As an aside, US has pumped a huge amount of development money into that country and Afghanistan is still a pretty poor country.
Anyone can play these âoeintelligentâ math games...
My team had implemented the IPv6 stack in Netware back in 2004. We had been involved in extensive interoperability testing against most of the major vendors.
The casual user may not have heard of it but those days (of IPv6 being new) are long over. None of the hardware, or software is new now. Except perhaps application software but I have seen product managers across the globe weave v6 into their product plans over the past 3-4 years as we've ran out of addresses.
I am willing to take that bet on bugs - yes there will be a few but not as many as you expect. Exploitable - well I've seen the intersection of security (firewalls, ta-da, what have you) and v6 being discussed some 4 years ago. I don't think that will be an issue.
Perhaps the only issue might be massive scalability. But I'm willing to bet that is not going be a major issue for quite a while.
Oi! Wait a minute. I know you used to get new manual typewriters in India for approx $50-60 or so. I'm sure Bangladesh will not be too different.
you'll get refurbished/second-hand typewriters for less than half that - most typists are now junking their old elephants for a PC. That's what you need. Oh yes, and a bunch of LED based solar powered lanterns that's very popular in the rural areas. Put them out in the sun in the day and they give you 5-6 hours light in the evening/night (so you can operate all the way till 11pm).
At approx $20-30 per typewriter & 1 lantern per 15-20 kids, you should have a good business model there. There's loads of people around who'd fund such a business + mentor you to boot.
No GPL is not so much of a commercial roadblock for the Linux desktops/laptops. At least not in most Organizations.
I think the issues are: a. Linux is more complicated to maintain b. IS is not really geared to support Linux. c. The Organization's internal tools run on Win/IE d. Most documents exchanged are geared towards MS office-x
a. Let me give you an example (personal experience) of the first point.
I have a Kubuntu laptop that I use for my professional work and I notice that its stability deteriorates with time. Finally, it gets so bad that I end up re-installing the OS and all the apps (with it's attendant loss of time & pain).
For example, since my last install (some 8 months ago), my laptop's touchpad and ethernet have stopped functioning during one of the many upgrades. Also, my powersave modes don't work properly.
While I have work arounds for the moment, looks like I'm headed into a fresh re-install in (perhaps) a few months if things get worse.
Honestly, I don't have the time to sit / debug / fix these issues (This is not my core focus and I do other things for a living). While I am a bit more relaxed and can take these things in my stride, I can't imagine my peers and seniors to go through this. Stability is critical if Linux is to take off in the desktop market.
I do hope someone fixes this - it is simply a matter of better testing & release planning.
b. IS folks with Linux skills tend to be more expensive than the Win folks and end up being used to manage Linux Servers. I find very less Linux IS skills in the Desktop environments.
c. Most internal tools - budgeting tools, planning & reporting, governance tools are geared for Win/IE (some don't even run in Firefox). These need to be migrated to Linux/Mozilla/pure HTML-5 (at least tested and bug-fixed). Organizations will be slow (given limited budgets for these things) in doing this migration.
d. Most reporting systems use Excel spreadsheets - we (managers) end up using these as customers send us MS Word & Excel documents. Why MS? because some "intelligent" folks exploit these tools to the hilt and use VB scripts/macros which don't run in Libre/Openoffice.
OK. Having been negative so far, let me talk about my experience in implementing Linux in my teams in one project. 1. We pitched the following advantages to our management: - Saving Licenses - Giving the developers a better development and learning environment (Some of them were working on an application targetted at Solaris Servers).
2. I got the various approvals (these were critical as I was asked for these during project audits). and had my UNIX developers to migrate their laptops/desktops. They were pretty happy. The only issues we faced were: - No IS support both within our Organization and from the clients. - We couldn't run some of the windows based tools (they'd crash/hang in WINE). I ended up having a few folks (the leads) to dual-boot their machines.
3. Some of the components we were enhancing were implemented in.NET and the developers/testers working on these had to continue with their Win boxes.
4. Migrating the Managers wasn't possible, as first of all they didn't have Linux user skills (don't forget - no IS support), secondly, the managers needed to use far more Organization tools (which ran on Win) and finally, document exchanges with the client were these fancy spreadsheets with all kinds of VB scripts enabled.
Net: Some 45% of the team ended up using Linux. Which to my mind was a pretty successful experiment.
I had to scroll right down to the last quarter of the page before I came across this (relevant) comment on the Car (apart from the two or three comments right on top). The entire discussion has been about: - How India is poor and the poor can't afford the car - How India is a hell hole/shit hole/insert-your-favourite-expletive
I've yet to complete reading the whole thing but I bet I'm going to see some comments about: - outsourcing - corruption - Fix poverty first and then raise your head - and more
Everytime I see a reference to India, that's most of the conversation. Makes me feel sad!!!!
As an Indian (engineer), let me get on my soap-box just the one time: * As with any new product version 1.0 will always have gaps. Version 2.0 will be better and so on. So should we not invent, create? Yes, there will be mistakes. But screw ups are part of creating.
* Yes we care about our poor and do work at improving our society's lot. We have a roadmap and have achieved quite a bit since Independence and will continue to progress along that roadmap. Raving and ranting about it will not change how we invest in these initiatives. But yes, we will continue to progress.
* We care about this world we live in. For many years we've taken. We also would like to contribute. Is that such a crime?
* Finally (:-) as one who's been part of the whole IT/Software outsourcing evolution for a while), let me weigh in with our take on outsourcing - and I've heard these from quite a few friends of mine. For many years we've seen how jobs coming to India have resulted in loss of jobs in the west - how families, careers have been impacted. There's not much we can do to change the course of how this movement has happened but we do care and have tried to help in our own way - by asking for people to be held back, by attempting to grow the size of the program/product so that more people would be required. A lot of small things. Yes I know we have not been very successful but we continue to try in our own ways.
Actually our space initiatives have paid off pretty well. Multi-band observation satellites have helped farmers significantly improve their crop yields.
Telecommunication satellites have helped us to connect remote areas that otherwise would never have been connected. these help in providing telemedicine services to people who may not normally have access to Doctors.
Doordarshan - Indias (Govt. owned) TV channel (Something like BBC) used to broadcast K12 lessons across the country in the 70s (I believe they still do). This has helped in improving literacy across the country.
We definitely need to have both R&D as well as economic development. Both go together.
Just to take one example - Agriculture research triggered the green revolution in the 60s & the 70s. The results of this research helped us become an agriculture surplus country.
Thinking that one should focus on immediate problems alone is being extremely short-sighted.
The tank is insulated and generally stays hot for quite a while.
It works very well for us - even on the rainy days (I live in India). We even get really hot water early in the morning. This cuts our electricity bill by about 30%. Solar heaters are very popular here.
Incidentally the outage didn't hit South India at all (where most of the IT business is). We have a separate grid. Phone, wireless networks and broadband were unaffected in my experience. That's because these setups are fault-tolerant (and that includes electrical faults).
I am a bit jaded, but it seems to me that the most important skills one can learn is the skill of how to get someone else to do the work.
Yes that is a key skill but if we have everyone who knows how to get the work done, who really does the work? Even then, everyone will have to work at analyzing, managing, tracking (thus needing math/programming etc., skills) to make sure the others work.
And:-P no, outsourcing is not the answer because someone has to do the work to figure out what to tell 'em to do.
Slashdot Mirror
India actually gives a lot of aid. This one's from 2017: http://www.newindianexpress.co... The quantum of aid it gives is significantly larger than the aid given it it. We told the UK and other countries way back to STOP giving aid to us but they begged us to continue taking the aid. So, if your country gives aid to India, please please reach out to your congressmen (or whoever) and tell them to stop giving us aid. We DON'T need it.
Thought I'd answer this one about standing up and showing the world.
Taco Cowboy - We're not in a hurry. I think (as an Indian), being inclusive is far more important and this will help us all succeed together. We still don't have the strength/power to do that today but as you can see, we're building up to it.
Yes, we (especially those of us who have worked outside India) are pretty aware of some of the racist comments - a lot of us have experienced it. But having been born and brought up in an extremely diverse society, we know how to come together to succeed together.
Give us time. One day, we will say yes we can!! (stand together)...
..In particular the Executive that had the entires companies Salary in an XLS document on their hard-drive should be fired immediately..
I have worked at a pretty senior level in a very large and global Software company. Here's roughly how the process of deciding salaries happens.
Once we've ranked and sync'd up with our managers AND with our peers, the data is uploaded into the salary tool. This is an online tool.
However, we can (and do) download csv files from the tool - including past and proposed salaries since it is so much easier to juggle data in Excel.
The reason I describe this process is - if my (or any of the other managers') machines are hacked while we are making the salary decisions, the hackers will surely get the salary data. The download is necessary since the Salary tool is not as flexible as looking at data in an xls. This is especially true when one is looking at the salary of a very large number of people. This, to my knowledge, is true for most large Organizations and based on your point, most senior managers of the organization hacked would get fired.
Here's the trend from '90s to today. Courtesy @Vivek Wadhwa: http://venturebeat.com/2014/11...
Hmmmm... Interesting.
here's an Indian (entrepreneural) perspective.
Let me start with a few stories:
The founder of Snapdeal http://www.snapdeal.com/ (an India focused ecommerce company) wanted to do a startup in the Valley but didn't get a visa. So he decided to stay back and do his startup in Bangalore. Snapdeal is now valued at ~$10B and is challenging both Amazon & Flipkart here. Their YoY growth is 6x.
Zomato http://www.zomato.com/ started of by consolidating its presence in India and has now gone multi-national (15 countries and expanding). They haven't gone to the US yet.
There are quite a few startups happening here that are focused on India, the rest of AsiaPac & EU regions and a lot of these have just begun to scale. These startups have started taking the cream of the Engg folks who would have otherwise gone to Infosys, Wipro and from there on to the US.
In fact, I know of a couple of headhunters who place US engineers with Indian startups in India. It is a trickle now and I think it would be good to cherry pick the better ones from out there. There are lots of seriously good engineers who we can use.
As an entrepreneur/co-founder myself (of an early stage in the enterprise space), it makes a lot of sense for us to be India and AsiaPac focused - We have a large market that we would convert first. First of all it is so much easier for us to sell in my backyard and then I honestly don't have the time to wade through all the Visa & other issues that the US would throw at us.
The only reason I would consider the US is the size of the market which will be important to me once I've consolidated and have become profitable. The market that is right in front of me (India and then China) is large enough for me to grow to be a fairly large entity.
I am sorely disappointed. There seems to be a lot of racism here. Here's some more: http://www.firstpost.com/world...
Honestly, I am unable to comprehend why there's so much racism. The US is known for ensuring racism doesn't happen as compared to a lot of other place.
For those interested in detailed tracking: http://www.hindustantimes.com/...
There have been significant innovations brought to the global space efforts by Mangalyaan. These innovations are the ones that cut the costs of the Mars initiative to $75M.
There have been innovations in planning, management and execution. The key ones have been a strategic focus on component reuse and leveraging other ongoing space missions within ISRO to concurrently complete tasks for Mangalyaan (:-) Isro folks hate the nickname). The whole project was planned in detail and completely schedule driven. Mangalyaan took 18 months from Mission announcement to lift-off. http://www.forbes.com/sites/sa...
The other major innovation was in terms of software modelling & simulation of the entire mission. Physical tests were made redundant on a scale never done before - just one prototype was needed. This cut waste, time & costs significantly.
ISRO chose a longer route but the slingshotting technique paid off in terms of far lesser fuel consumption (thus reducing the weight of the space craft) and yet took approximately the same time as the Maven.
Low manpower costs also helped.
I would think the payoffs to the global space community are in terms of cutting edge techniques developed. Collaboration with the Indian industry have helped build next-gen capability which will pay off in the years to come.
The Mom, a Technology demonstrator is a product of Jugaad or Frugal Engineering. The next mission is scheduled for sometime in 2017-2020. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Thought you all would find this link interesting: http://www.hindustantimes.com/specials/coverage/marsorbitermission/marsorbitermission/mangalyaan-on-track-5-things-to-know-about-india-s-mars-orbiter-mission/sp-article10-1263914.aspx
Really wish I could mod this up.
Completely with you argStyopa
Yeah, Indian papers are full of how the rover survived the lunar night.
I wish them the best of luck and hope that the mechanical faults are minor.
Bravo!!!
So the authors take a wicked problem and find the just one element that solves it. This is intelligence of the highest order. I wonder if they are even aware of the definition of a wicked problem. I guess I have this problem with theoreticians.
Using the authors' logic, then if one were to make everyone healthy in â" say Afghanistan, then that country will have escaped poverty and would get to be on the road to being a developed nation...
It doesn't matter how healthy, productive or motivated the Afghan citizen is. His/Her life is impacted by people coming over their border with a very clear agenda.
As an aside, US has pumped a huge amount of development money into that country and Afghanistan is still a pretty poor country.
Anyone can play these âoeintelligentâ math games...
My team had implemented the IPv6 stack in Netware back in 2004. We had been involved in extensive interoperability testing against most of the major vendors.
The casual user may not have heard of it but those days (of IPv6 being new) are long over. None of the hardware, or software is new now. Except perhaps application software but I have seen product managers across the globe weave v6 into their product plans over the past 3-4 years as we've ran out of addresses.
I am willing to take that bet on bugs - yes there will be a few but not as many as you expect. Exploitable - well I've seen the intersection of security (firewalls, ta-da, what have you) and v6 being discussed some 4 years ago. I don't think that will be an issue.
Perhaps the only issue might be massive scalability. But I'm willing to bet that is not going be a major issue for quite a while.
Oi!
Wait a minute. I know you used to get new manual typewriters in India for approx $50-60 or so. I'm sure Bangladesh will not be too different.
you'll get refurbished/second-hand typewriters for less than half that - most typists are now junking their old elephants for a PC. That's what you need. Oh yes, and a bunch of LED based solar powered lanterns that's very popular in the rural areas. Put them out in the sun in the day and they give you 5-6 hours light in the evening/night (so you can operate all the way till 11pm).
At approx $20-30 per typewriter & 1 lantern per 15-20 kids, you should have a good business model there. There's loads of people around who'd fund such a business + mentor you to boot.
All the best.
No GPL is not so much of a commercial roadblock for the Linux desktops/laptops. At least not in most Organizations.
I think the issues are:
a. Linux is more complicated to maintain
b. IS is not really geared to support Linux.
c. The Organization's internal tools run on Win/IE
d. Most documents exchanged are geared towards MS office-x
a. Let me give you an example (personal experience) of the first point.
I have a Kubuntu laptop that I use for my professional work and I notice that its stability deteriorates with time. Finally, it gets so bad that I end up re-installing the OS and all the apps (with it's attendant loss of time & pain).
For example, since my last install (some 8 months ago), my laptop's touchpad and ethernet have stopped functioning during one of the many upgrades. Also, my powersave modes don't work properly.
While I have work arounds for the moment, looks like I'm headed into a fresh re-install in (perhaps) a few months if things get worse.
Honestly, I don't have the time to sit / debug / fix these issues (This is not my core focus and I do other things for a living). While I am a bit more relaxed and can take these things in my stride, I can't imagine my peers and seniors to go through this. Stability is critical if Linux is to take off in the desktop market.
I do hope someone fixes this - it is simply a matter of better testing & release planning.
b. IS folks with Linux skills tend to be more expensive than the Win folks and end up being used to manage Linux Servers. I find very less Linux IS skills in the Desktop environments.
c. Most internal tools - budgeting tools, planning & reporting, governance tools are geared for Win/IE (some don't even run in Firefox). These need to be migrated to Linux/Mozilla/pure HTML-5 (at least tested and bug-fixed). Organizations will be slow (given limited budgets for these things) in doing this migration.
d. Most reporting systems use Excel spreadsheets - we (managers) end up using these as customers send us MS Word & Excel documents. Why MS? because some "intelligent" folks exploit these tools to the hilt and use VB scripts/macros which don't run in Libre/Openoffice.
OK. Having been negative so far, let me talk about my experience in implementing Linux in my teams in one project.
1. We pitched the following advantages to our management:
- Saving Licenses
- Giving the developers a better development and learning environment (Some of them were working on an application targetted at Solaris Servers).
2. I got the various approvals (these were critical as I was asked for these during project audits). and had my UNIX developers to migrate their laptops/desktops. They were pretty happy. The only issues we faced were:
- No IS support both within our Organization and from the clients.
- We couldn't run some of the windows based tools (they'd crash/hang in WINE). I ended up having a few folks (the leads) to dual-boot their machines.
3. Some of the components we were enhancing were implemented in .NET and the developers/testers working on these had to continue with their Win boxes.
4. Migrating the Managers wasn't possible, as first of all they didn't have Linux user skills (don't forget - no IS support), secondly, the managers needed to use far more Organization tools (which ran on Win) and finally, document exchanges with the client were these fancy spreadsheets with all kinds of VB scripts enabled.
Net: Some 45% of the team ended up using Linux. Which to my mind was a pretty successful experiment.
I had to scroll right down to the last quarter of the page before I came across this (relevant) comment on the Car (apart from the two or three comments right on top). The entire discussion has been about:
- How India is poor and the poor can't afford the car
- How India is a hell hole/shit hole/insert-your-favourite-expletive
I've yet to complete reading the whole thing but I bet I'm going to see some comments about:
- outsourcing
- corruption
- Fix poverty first and then raise your head
- and more
Everytime I see a reference to India, that's most of the conversation. Makes me feel sad!!!!
As an Indian (engineer), let me get on my soap-box just the one time:
* As with any new product version 1.0 will always have gaps. Version 2.0 will be better and so on. So should we not invent, create? Yes, there will be mistakes. But screw ups are part of creating.
* Yes we care about our poor and do work at improving our society's lot. We have a roadmap and have achieved quite a bit since Independence and will continue to progress along that roadmap. Raving and ranting about it will not change how we invest in these initiatives. But yes, we will continue to progress.
* We care about this world we live in. For many years we've taken. We also would like to contribute. Is that such a crime?
* Finally (:-) as one who's been part of the whole IT/Software outsourcing evolution for a while), let me weigh in with our take on outsourcing - and I've heard these from quite a few friends of mine.
For many years we've seen how jobs coming to India have resulted in loss of jobs in the west - how families, careers have been impacted. There's not much we can do to change the course of how this movement has happened but we do care and have tried to help in our own way - by asking for people to be held back, by attempting to grow the size of the program/product so that more people would be required. A lot of small things. Yes I know we have not been very successful but we continue to try in our own ways.
Actually our space initiatives have paid off pretty well. Multi-band observation satellites have helped farmers significantly improve their crop yields.
Telecommunication satellites have helped us to connect remote areas that otherwise would never have been connected. these help in providing telemedicine services to people who may not normally have access to Doctors.
Doordarshan - Indias (Govt. owned) TV channel (Something like BBC) used to broadcast K12 lessons across the country in the 70s (I believe they still do). This has helped in improving literacy across the country.
We definitely need to have both R&D as well as economic development. Both go together.
Just to take one example - Agriculture research triggered the green revolution in the 60s & the 70s. The results of this research helped us become an agriculture surplus country.
Thinking that one should focus on immediate problems alone is being extremely short-sighted.
It works very well for us - even on the rainy days (I live in India). We even get really hot water early in the morning. This cuts our electricity bill by about 30%. Solar heaters are very popular here.
Incidentally the outage didn't hit South India at all (where most of the IT business is). We have a separate grid. Phone, wireless networks and broadband were unaffected in my experience. That's because these setups are fault-tolerant (and that includes electrical faults).
I am a bit jaded, but it seems to me that the most important skills one can learn is the skill of how to get someone else to do the work.
Yes that is a key skill but if we have everyone who knows how to get the work done, who really does the work? Even then, everyone will have to work at analyzing, managing, tracking (thus needing math/programming etc., skills) to make sure the others work.
And :-P no, outsourcing is not the answer because someone has to do the work to figure out what to tell 'em to do.
I'd say it's the best programming book ever written (or at least the best I've read).
Some books that went a very long way for me: Code Complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Complete Programming pearls: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/ I won't add Knuth here as that was (kind of) a textbook but...