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Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

#12

Post by khaledh »

There's no single book that I would recommend. What worked for me is to read the history of programming languages (and operating systems, to better understand the relationship between them).

My recommendation is to read the original papers/manuals (bitsavers and ACM/Sci-Hub are my main resources). Starting with how computers were programmed befor high level languages were developed (i.e. machine code and assembly), then going through the early languages: Fortran, Lisp, COBOL, Algol; and understand why they were developed and the main ideas in those languages. Lisp had a huge influence on later generations of functional programming languages; Algol (first developed in 1958) is the granddaddy of all what we call today C-like languages, including CPL, BCPL, B, C, Pascal, C++, Java, C#, etc. Simula (developed in the early 60s) is the granddaddy of most object-oriented languages, including Smalltalk, C++ and their descendants.

Many ideas that are core to modern programming languages were developed in those early formative years (late 50s, 60s, and 70s); e.g. lexical scoping, dynamic dispatch, coroutines, garbage collection, encapsulation, virtual machine bytecode, metaprogramming, and many others.

I find it fascinating to read this early literature and understand why and how those ideas (that still live to this day) were formed.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

#13

Post by crossroadsguy »

K&R. It was the best programming book I read. I have not read many other programming books to be honest. I couldn't finish most rather.

It's been years since I even touched C and at this point I am not going back, I know; but as an Android dev I wish I could find a non-lengthy book like K&R that would expose me to Kotlin like I was exposed to C, while helping unlearn a lot of Java.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

#15

Post by the_only_law »

gompertz wrote: post #8
sethammons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Premature abstraction is just another way to say premature optimization and it is the root of so many problems. YAGNI (you aint gonna need it).

If that's what your looking for, I find books that are adopted as university textbooks are best. i.e. C Programming Modern Approach by KN King, Object Pascal Handbook by Marco Cantu. Generally I'm staying away from O'Reilly, No Starch Press etc.. They all feel like books created by pasting a bunch of blog posts together. University texts are usually twice the price, but IMHO worth it - they are made for teaching know…

> University texts are usually twice the price

Yeah I find these are normally the books I want now, but it doesn’t take that many to suddenly turn my cart into $1k.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

#17

Post by dilippkumar »

I’m currently enjoying “From Mathematics to Generic Programming” by Alexander Stepanov and Daniel E. Rose.

One thing about the book is that it’s a lot more interesting than what a cursory scan of the table of contents would suggest. An O(log n) algorithm for multiplication doesn’t seem interesting at first. But the authors do an amazing job of starting from familiar ideas and building up to surprisingly beautiful and elegant ideas.

I think I’m finally able to grok c++ templates half way through this book.

One unfortunate downside to this book is that the authors wrote this before concepts were introduced in c++20. I would love to see an updated edition of this book that use the real c++20 concepts. However, this doesn’t diminish my recommendation for this book.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

#18

Post by amusedcyclist »

dilippkumar wrote: post #17

I’m currently enjoying “From Mathematics to Generic Programming” by Alexander Stepanov and Daniel E. Rose. One thing about the book is that it’s a lot more interesting than what a cursory scan of the table of contents would suggest. An O(log n) algorithm for multiplication doesn’t seem interesting at first. But the authors do an amazing job of starting from familiar ideas and building up to surprisingly beautiful and…

What do you mean by an O(log(n)) algorithm for multiplication ? The naive approach takes O(n^2) and O(nlog(n)) is extremely state of the art and is unlikely to be in a programming book

Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?

#19

Post by adrianvincent »

'You Don't Know JS' by Kyle Simpson. A series of books that are a must read for any JavaScript developer. They are available for free on GitHub or you can purchase a retail version. He's working on a second edition right now.

https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

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