"The Icon Programming Language".
https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/ftp/doc/lb1up.pdf
Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?
51–56 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?
#52There are many great ones listed here, but I wouldn't give any single book more credit than how they combine in practice, as the question sort of implies. The best lessons I've learned is how to balance all these good ideas for each problem, idea, implementation. How do do OO without lots of racy mutable state, using immutability efficiently, composing pure functions, identifying what to abstract explicitly vs allowi…
Hm. Maybe that's because the concerns must be balanced differently for different applications?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?
#53The AWK Programming Language (1988) https://archive.org/details/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7 Best as in best written, along with K&R—Brian Kernighan co-authoring both can't be an accident!—it's just a pleasure to read. I use it as a model when writing documentation myself. They get you started using AWK literally on page 1. Later they get into the details of particular use cases—profiling, making DSL interpreters/compilers,…
You say you are using AWK on a daily basis, including web scraping. Most programmers use Python libraries Scrapy and BeautifulSoup, and R libraries like rvest and RCurl. How do you parse HTML with AWK - as part of a pipeline including wget, hxselect, and lynx, or just by using the AWK regular expressions? I couldn't find many examples, except for some basic Rosetta code script and random blog posts. Can you share some example script?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?
#541. SICP 2. How to Design Programs 3. Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself Into a Corner
SICP is a fantastic and difficult book. I got through about 50% and have a much bigger appreciation for programming now.
FYI - The original was written in Scheme. There is a newer version based in python which I haven't tried.
Edit: The python version is highly contested. Scheme is the more difficult and therefore the best way to understand these principles.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?
#55I’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…
Sounds interesting. I know no C++, can I still enjoy the book? I have no interest in learning it.
I don't know the answer - This is primarily a book about generic programming using C++ templates.
I suppose you can learn about the power of generic programming and apply it to another language. There is probably some non-zero amount of things that you can pick up from this book that you can apply elsewhere. However, I don't know if that is enough to justify going through this book. Your milage might vary.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best programming book you've read?
#56There are many great ones listed here, but I wouldn't give any single book more credit than how they combine in practice, as the question sort of implies. The best lessons I've learned is how to balance all these good ideas for each problem, idea, implementation. How do do OO without lots of racy mutable state, using immutability efficiently, composing pure functions, identifying what to abstract explicitly vs allowi…
Hm. Maybe that's because the concerns must be balanced differently for different applications?
That actually makes sense to me now. It's about knowing what matters when. Code smells is sort of there, but people tend to get dogmatic when invoking them. It's about having a sense of when something is 'too much', or there ought to be a way do to it with less of something, etc. Or conversely recognizing that 'this', however rough-seeming, is about as good as it's going to get, without a genius showing up with a brand new idea.