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Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#81

The Art of Multiprocessor Programming by Shavit & Herlihy. Recommend topping it off with the lecture delivered at Microsoft Research ( https://youtu.be/nrUszqrlvi8 )

This is an excellent book! It was my prescribed textbook for an undergrad concurrent systems course. It's very "proofy" but explains a large amount of important concepts quite well.

The book is divided into two sections: Principles and Practice. The former introduces basic terminology, concepts and common mistakes. The latter is where it gets interesting and introduces real-world problems like cache coherence traffic.

The language used in the book is Java but the concepts can be applied to practically any language that supports concurrency. Highly recommended!

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#83
John Day's Patterns in Network Architecture is a highly opinionated book (by someone who was around for the development of the Internet and OSI standards), and one that provided a radically new perspective on networking and network protocols that I have found useful over the past year.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#84

I'll give you a couple. Note that some of these are rehashes of my earlier comments. # Elements of Programming https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Alexander-Stepan... This book proposes how to write C++-ish code in a mathematical way that makes all your code terse. In this talk, Sean Parent, at that time working on Adobe Photoshop, estimated that the PS codebase could be reduced from 3,000,000 LOC to 30,000 L…

Amazon links with your affiliate tag, seriously?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#85

I'll give you a couple. Note that some of these are rehashes of my earlier comments. # Elements of Programming https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Alexander-Stepan... This book proposes how to write C++-ish code in a mathematical way that makes all your code terse. In this talk, Sean Parent, at that time working on Adobe Photoshop, estimated that the PS codebase could be reduced from 3,000,000 LOC to 30,000 L…

Amazon links with your affiliate tag, seriously?

what about them?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#86

I'll give you a couple. Note that some of these are rehashes of my earlier comments. # Elements of Programming https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Alexander-Stepan... This book proposes how to write C++-ish code in a mathematical way that makes all your code terse. In this talk, Sean Parent, at that time working on Adobe Photoshop, estimated that the PS codebase could be reduced from 3,000,000 LOC to 30,000 L…

Amazon links with your affiliate tag, seriously?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#88

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken Basically it has you hands on work through the basics of every concept active in a modern computer save for networks and web. You use software tools provided with the book to design memory, ALUs, intepreters, VMs, compilers Operating Systems and applications. Available as a free online class at http:/…

I'd definitely recommend TECS for folks looking to learn more about the many layers of abstraction sitting under their interpreter/VM. Also worth taking a look at the Little OS Book or the OSDev wiki for some more insight into a less idealized/more crufty architecture.

I wound up spending the most time playing around with chapter 9 (the Tetris part of Nand to Teris) and made a very basic ray-casting game a la Wolfenstein 3D: https://youtu.be/c-J7lwKWDN8

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#89
Good Math: A Geek's Guide to the Beauty of Numbers, Logic, and Computation

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Math-Computation-Pragmatic-Progr...

A great review of college math and CS. The book goes over FOPL, Set theory, Turing machines and lambda calculus among other things. A fun read!

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#90

Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists Note, you have to be willing to put the time in, especially if your linear algebra is rusty or (like me) you have only a passing familiarity with complex numbers. With that in mind, it's almost entirely self-contained and you can immediately start to make connections with classical computing if you're familiar with automata. I've been interested in learning about quantum comp…

Leonard Susskind's "Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum" as well as Nielsen & Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" are also fantastic resources. I've got both sitting here on my desk :)
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