Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 344 posts

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#241

Post by jerf »

pvg wrote: post #231
jerf wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a book is "not language agnostic" because two particular languages aren't very good at it. C's lack of closure support is unique among any language still in use, for a variety of reasons. Java... was Java. If you weren't there you may not remember or understand, but at the time OO was at its most dogmatic and either it was an object or it was not included. Anything you could do with a closure could be d…

The book is not language agnostic because it's not language agnostic, mostly. The fact that many other languages are a poorer fit for what it's trying to teach is pretty much the definition of 'not language-agnostic'.

I don't know what task could possibly exist for which there are not significantly better and worse languages. Even today's "list of practical projects that anyone can solve in any programming language" [1] I can see at a casual glance that any of them that are not simply trivial will have better and worse languages. A definition of "lanugage agnostic" that either covers no tasks, or covers only very trivial tasks, isn't very useful. (Although in the latter case one can attain some insight by pondering why only such trivial tasks might be considered "lanugage agnostic".)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481941

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#242

Post by k__ »

eastWestMath wrote: post #203
barrkel wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't read the dragon book if you're interested in compilers. It's lex and parse heavy, and is not up to date with more recent best practice on codegen. Further, the lex and parse end of it is focused on the kind of theory you need to build tools like lex and yacc, rather than stuff you need to know if you want to write a compiler. For a good intro of modern back end development, check out Engineering a Compiler. It'…

Writing a parser is broadly applicable to a wide range of problems, not just writing a compiler.

yes.

Wrote many for XML/json based configs.

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#243

Post by kristjan »

petercooper wrote: post #26

Programming Pearls by Joe Bentley. And its followup. It's old but it does get you thinking about things. I'd also recommend The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk as it teaches so much about what makes modern Unix what it is but.. it's arguably quite oriented around C by necessity. It's not a "C book" by any means though.

Correction: Jon Bentley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientis...

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#245

Post by beat »

barrkel wrote: post #168
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #58

Some of the most interesting books I've read in support of my software-development work are: * "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools" by Aho et al. (i.e., "the dragon book") * "Data Flow Analysis: Theory and Practice" by Khedker et al. * "Understanding MySQL Internals" by Sasha Pachev. * "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" by Gray and Reuter. * "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication" by Tse and V…

Don't read the dragon book if you're interested in compilers. It's lex and parse heavy, and is not up to date with more recent best practice on codegen. Further, the lex and parse end of it is focused on the kind of theory you need to build tools like lex and yacc, rather than stuff you need to know if you want to write a compiler. For a good intro of modern back end development, check out Engineering a Compiler. It'…

Don't read only the Dragon book if you're interested in compilers (or parsing in general). But it should be read, in addition to whatever else you read on the subject. It's classic for a reason.

Most programmers don't understand parsing worth a crap, imho. Some compiler theory would do most of us some good. I read it because I was doing data stream parsing back in the olden days before XML (which was before JSON), when we had to write our own stream formats. It really changed my whole way of thinking about a fundamental class of programming problems.

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#246

Post by beat »

suyash wrote: post #195
otodic wrote: post #193

The Pragmatic Programmer: https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer

Plus 1 to this one and another one by the same Publisher is 'Pragmatic Thinking & Learning Refactor your Wetware'

That's by Andy Hunt, one of the Pragmatic Programming authors. Pragmatic Programmer, as a publisher, has produced dozens of books. They're like another O'Reilly.

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#247

Post by beat »

chuckdries wrote: post #115
Rannath wrote: post #100

Not really programming books, but these have helped me with programming jobs. -How to make friends and influence people. Anyone who works collaboratively with people needs to be able to communicate effectively. -The Elements of style. Writing understandable code is similar to any other type of writing.

> How to make friends and influence people I swear I've had this book recommended to me at least a thousand times, I'm almost suspicious though I don't know that suspicious is the right word

The title seems, well, creepy, in modern language. Like it's manipulative.

It's not.

It was written in the 1930s, and has been continuously in print since then. How many books have achieved that honor? That's because it's one of the best books you will ever read. Absorbing its lessons will make you a better person.

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#248

Post by beat »

shagie wrote: post #32

A Pattern Language by by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language From a blog post ( http://the-whiteboard.github.io/book/review/2016/02/17/five-... ) I wrote a bit ago... --- The first thing that will come to mind when seeing that title is “ug, another book on patterns.” Or maybe “I thought it was named Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object…

Since reading that book, I apply it every time I look at a new public space or building interior. It's utterly brilliant.

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#249

Post by aHernandezI »

I loved cracking the coding interview, even if you want to practice for an interview or not, with this book you can get a friendly reminder of data structures and algorithms, time complexity and related topics (and you can improve your problem-solving skills too). For me at least it was useful for feeling again a great interest in these topics and to love even more my job.

Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

#250

Post by silentsea90 »

fatjonny wrote: post #223

I've been thoroughly enjoying "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann. It primarily deals with the current state of storing data (databases, etc) starting with storing data on one machine and expanding to distributed architectures...but most importantly it goes over the trade-offs between the various approaches. It is at a high level because of the amount of ground it covers, but it contains a ton…

+1. Great for getting a lay of the land on distributed systems problems. I haven't ever studied distributed systems formally though, so I wonder how this differs from that.
Post reply on HN