Five memorable books about programming (2008)

srean

Rarely have I felt the urge to fly out of my building and grab any random guy on the street and exclaim can you see how cool this is, can you please. That happened to me when I read The Little Schemer. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262560993/the-little-schemer/ (The other time was when I saw a Hasui) https://ukiyo-e.org/artist/kawase-hasui

so-cal-schemer

These are great books. I was going to suggest Zen of Assembly Language and Leo Brodie's books for this list from last month: Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read( https://readrare.com/ ) 191 points|miletus|29 days ago|67 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024055

JKCalhoun

“This is also one of the most bizarrely delayed technical book releases I can recall. The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086…” I’m starting work on the (tentatively titled) “The Second Book of KIM.”

jdw64

Software Design for Flexibility (2021) This book left the deepest impression on me. I was fascinated by the concept of additive programming. Personally, I spent a good while thinking about and studying the idea of "evolvability." True, the overuse of flexibility can obscure control flow, and opinions on the book are divided but I learned many concepts from it. Since I often work on maintaining and modifying legacy code, this book was a great help.

Flow

My favorite two computer books are “Starting Forth” and “Let over Lambda”. It’s something about the language and the approach I like.

dang

Related. Others? Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3917165 - May 2012 (1 comment) Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128054 - March 2008 (14 comments)

so-cal-schemer

How about Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus? https://hop.perl.plover.com/ Some other great low flying titles: The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561273/the-computational-bea... The Nature of Computation by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens. https://nature-of-computation.org/ Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dasgupta/book/index.html and On Lisp , of course: https://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

pluc

Who reads programming books anymore? People don't even read code

pan69

> The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086, yet it was published when the 80486 was showing up in high-end desktop PCs. The book goes all the way up to discussing the 386. It's just that the foundations is rooted in 8086, which is a large chunk of the book. My favorite books (or the ones I have spend most time with) and that have been most formative for me are: Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan Zen of Graphics Programming by Michael Abrash The Zen Of Assembly Language by Michael Abrash Programmer's Guide to the EGA, VGA, and Super VGA Cards by Richard F. Ferraro The Indispensable PC Hardware Book by Hans-Peter Messmer

so-cal-schemer

Another on my reading list: The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Gregor Kiczales et al https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4088774W/The_art_of_the_meta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Metaobject_Prot...

jrmg

Programmers at work: I bought a used copy of it - probably after reading this the first time it was posted. Great book, if you can find it. Code , by Charles Petzold should be on any programmer’s list - and the list of anyone with curiosity about how the modern world works. It somehow manages the amazing trick of being readable for the novice, but also containing nuggets of insight for the expert all at the same time. Such a well written book.

rbanffy

For me, the blue Smalltalk book by Adele Goldberg was deeply formative. It was computing done right and from first principles. The other two formative experiences for me were using Cincom’s Mantis on the 3278 and Dataflex 2. Both made it obvious how quickly one could go from screen to persisted data, CRUD, application logic, and reporting with the right level of abstraction. Much later I described Dataflex as “Rails for the VT100”. Sadly, Cincom will not provide a hobby license to run it on an emulated 4381, and won’t even give away free manuals, and the company behind Dataflex (I don’t remember their name right now) seems to not even have any versions from that time. When I read Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages, it all clicked perfectly.

milofeynman

The only technical book I own is Designing Data-Intensive Applications and I think everyone should read the first part of it. I prefer learning as I go and have never enjoyed technical books, but I think everything is basically a database and understanding those fundamentals is very helpful.

bitfhacker

The book that made me see programming differently and the one that taught me the most was The C Programming Language, by Dennis Ritchie.

WillAdams

Published since then, and one which I need to re-read yet again is _A Philosophy of Software Design_ by John Ousterhout: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy-of...

so-cal-schemer

Has anyone read or can comment on this one?: Functional Design and Architecture: Examples in Haskell by Alexander Granin https://www.manning.com/books/functional-design-and-architec...

optimalsolver

The Atari Programming Manual, just for the cover alone: https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/13fq9xy/atar...

lanthissa

functional programming in scala was probably the biggest level up of my career from a book

jbmchuck

I'm a huge fan of Kernighan and Pike's 'The Practice of Programming'. An incredibly clearly written book that manages to show how to write great code without falling into any cargo cult acronym nonsense.