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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?

#21
Grokking algorithms. Great book, especially for someone like me who doesn't deal too much with this stuff (as an embedded systems engineer).

Grokking functional programming and deep learning seem awesome as well, but I haven't finished either so take my recommendation with a pinch of salt.

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

#22
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 computing for a few years now and this book finally got me going.

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-Computer-Scientists...

[update]

As an aside it's a really great excuse to try out one of the many computer algebra systems out there. I gave Mathematica a trial for fun since I'd already used SageMath in the past.

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

#23
post #12

"Structure and interpretation of computer programs" Definitely recommended.

I finished it up a few months ago and I cannot recommend it enough.

The real soul of SICP is in it's exercises however. It asks you to build on your own prior work in inventive ways, challenging you to solve the exercises correctly, but also to do so in a maintainable way.

I wrote up some supplementary material to make the experience smoother for a practicing programmer: High-level requirements of the chapter subprojects, Pitfalls and paradigms embedded in some of the footnotes, Answers to (nearly) all exercises, a testing framework for Chapter 4 interpreter (including the JIT compiler), a GUI for running Chapter 5 virtual machine here: https://github.com/zv/SICP-guile

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

#26
I've been reading _The Practice of Programming_ (Pike, Kernighan) lately; it's mainly geared towards Java and C/C++ programmers, but even as a DevOps engineer I'm finding a lot of it useful.

https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Programming-Addison-Wesley-P...

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

#29
More about programming than computer science, but it does talk a lot about and show some custom algorithms (it's more about programming-in-the-small, though it does talk about some big picture too), also it is old and out of print (last I checked), but I thought it was really good when I bought and read it, so mentioning it:

Writing Efficient Programs

Also has a great bunch of "war stories" about performance tuning in real-life, including one in which people, IIRC, improve the performance of quicksort on a supercomputer by 1 million times or some such, by working on tuning as well as architecture and algorithms at several levels of the stack, from the hardware on upwards.

by:

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

Edited to change Wikipedia URL to more specific one.

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

#30

Engineering a Compiler 2nd Ed by Cooper & Torczon I used it to supplement my prescribed compiler construction textbook and it's incredibly useful! Also surprisingly easy to read compared to some texts with a very math-heavy approach.

Fun fact: these two are married and the cutest couple. They walk to Rice's Coffeehouse almost daily together talking about whatever it is compiler professors talk about.
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