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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?

#51

Post by inimino »

apenney wrote: post #36
ZephyrP wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subproj…

The one thing I really wish I had was a comprehensive test suite for all the exercises. They are (obviously) hard to solve and there's no other way to see if you were right but to check the solution. It's a huge flaw in most CS books, feedback without hand feeding you the answers.

I disagree with this pretty strongly, actually. The best skill you can get from SICP-level exercises is looking at the code and being completely confident that you understand it and that it is correct. The best way to use them is to write the code without running it, and once you are sure, review it with someone else to find out if you were right.

This breaks down a bit around chapters four and five where you are plugging in parts of a larger code base, and the accidental complexity starts to dominate.

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

#52

Post by nickpeterson »

edko wrote: post #44

Type-driven development with Idris ( https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-i... ). It was a real eye-opener of what types can do.

I've been looking at this but I don't really know Haskell (just f#). In your opinion is it worth trying before knowing a Haskell? I'm mostly interested because I wish to learn f-star as well, which also has dependent types.

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

#54

Post by blain_the_train »

> This book will help you navigate the diverse and fast-changing landscape of technologies for storing and processing data. We compare a broad variety of tools and approaches, so that you can see the strengths and weaknesses of each, and decide what’s best for your application.

http://dataintensive.net/

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

#55

Post by amirbehzad »

Book: Star Schema, The Complete Reference, by Christopher Adamson. One of the best technical books ever written.

https://www.amazon.com/Schema-Complete-Reference-Christopher...

Article: Thinking Clearly about Performance, Cary Millsap (Method R Corporation)

http://method-r.com/papers?download=44:thinking-clearly-(pap...

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

#56

Post by jhbadger »

tpetricek wrote: post #37

A Science of Operations by Mark Priestley ( http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9781848825543 ) This is cheating a bit, because the book is history of computer science rather than computer science, but I think anyone interested in programming should read it. We often think about history of computing (and what it teaches us) in a retrospective way (we see all the amazing totally revolutionary things that happened), but it…

Along these lines, "A Life out of Sequence: A Data Driven History of Bioinformatics" (http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo1674439...)

If you you work in bioinformatics it is weird how little history the average bioinformatician knows (the field only really dates back to the late 1960s). People may know things like PAM matrices, but not Margaret Dayhoff who created them (not to mention the standard amino acid codes used today).

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

#57

Post by rough »

Has anyone read Probability and Computing: Randomized Algorithms and Probabilistic Analysis by Michael Mitzenmacher, Eli Upfal[0]? If so, how difficult are the exercises? Aside from doing problems I like to read solutions and analyze them to learn better style, new techniques/ideas. Are there any books like this one, but with solutions? Thanks.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521835402/ref=s9_simh_gw_...

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

#60

Post by jrbedard »

Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series) by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville

Came out in November 2016. Split in 3 parts:

Part I: Applied Math and Machine Learning Basics (Linear Algebra, Probability and Information Theory, Numerical computation)

Part II: Deep Networks: Modern Practices (Deep Feedforward Networks, Regularization, CNNs, RNNs, Practical Methodology & Applications)

Part III: Deep Learning Research (Linear Factor Models, Autoencoders, Representation Learning, Structured Probabilistic Models, Monte Carlo Methods, Inference, Partition Function, Deep Generative Models)

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Adaptive-Computation-Ma...

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