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Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?

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Re: Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?

#101
post #72

For a great introduction to file systems, I highly recommend Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo, creator of the Be File System who ended up moving to Apple and designed Spotlight, the file indexing and search system that was introduced in Mac OS X Tiger. It's very well written and you'll learn a lot. When I was hired in 2006 as a summer undergraduate research intern at an academ…

Very interesting! Do you know if this book also talks about the basics of distributed file systems or is it only for single machine?

If I recall correctly, I don't believe the book covers distributed file systems. For those, I highly recommend reading the research papers describing modern distributed file systems such as HDFS, Google's various storage systems and databases (such as Bigtable and Spanner), and Ceph, making sure to check the bibliographies and read the cited papers to get a better understanding of the background material. That's how I learned the basics of distributed file systems when I worked on a research project involving Ceph back when it was brand new.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> xchg rax,rax Yes!!! Great list, thanks for sharing.

I must be missing something here. Care to explain what this is?

Seems it's a book of assembler snippets. The Amazon page is less cryptic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502958082

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?

#103
post #7

Based on the prompt, I feel like Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby would qualify. https://poignant.guide/

Weird! I like the originality. But does it actually go into depth or is it really just a tutorial to Ruby basics? If it's ultimately just a guide to Ruby basics I wouldn't include it here since I'm thinking of books with some serious technical depth/discussion.

Oh no, it went quite deep in areas (e.g. eigenclasses) but it was generally in service of some of its more esoteric aims, not a ground-covering tome geared towards complete understanding.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?

#104
post #18

A list of this exact kind of books is presented here: https://blog.fogus.me/2015/04/27/six-works-of-computer-scien...

> Project Oberon: The design of an operating system and compiler - Wirth’s magnum opus is the quintessential example of Computer Science alternative-history world-building.

hilarious

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