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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?

#162

Post by hackermailman »

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.

There are some unit test libraries for SICP around http://web.mit.edu/~axch/www/test_manager.html

There's also the MIT online tutor for exercises http://icampustutor.csail.mit.edu/6.001-public/

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

#163

Post by pestaa »

dvirsky wrote: post #79
DubiousPusher wrote: post #64

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:/…

10 years in my to-read pile and going strong.

I empty my inbox periodically -- no reason to keep unread stuff around.

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

#164

Post by cperciva »

weavie wrote: post #109

If you are into operating systems: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Opera...

Seconded. After being a FreeBSD developer for a dozen years some people might expect me to know everything this book covers, but in fact I pulled it out just last month to help me understand how some details of how the VFS layer and the NFS client worked.

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

#168

Post by hackermailman »

adamnemecek wrote: post #43

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…

Practical Foundations for Programming Languages by Bob Harper is really good, plus there's a free draft of the second version on the author's site http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl.html

I always go to the book author's page first not only to get the errata but also discover things such as free lectures as in the case with Skeina's Algorithm Design Book

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

#169

Post by bbraasch »

johntran wrote: post #75

The Mythical Man-Month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month It was written 40 years ago, but it is still relevant to today. Its so important to think about how to build effective engineering teams.

Everything I needed to know about taking on software projects. "Prepare to throw one away".

The insights from reading this book years ago certainly helped me navigate project management as a rescue guy. By the time I was hired, the failing project was already part way through the experience that Brooks' book is based on, and he was writing the OS!!!

He writes about the origin of the svc (supervisor call) in OS360. They needed a way to keep track of them as they were popping up from all over, so they made a list, and you added yours to it, then other groups could check the list before they wrote another version of the same function.

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