The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

Post by amargado » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:08 PM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #161

eogas wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're free not to buy books through their affiliate links. You're only free to do this if you know that it's an issue. Unless you know about the affiliate program, you may be supporting this person against your own will. Even if you do know about the affiliate program, you may not know that after you click an affiliate link, the owner of the code gets a chunk of ANY Amazon purchase you make in the next 24 hours, wh…

I find this mindset baffling. I mean that earnestly. Can you try to explain why other people making money bothers you? It seems pretty clear that amazon thinks affiliates provide a useful service. And if you go to amazon because someone shared something that interested you enough to buy it, they've provided you with a service. What exactly is the problem?

Post by curuinor » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:13 PM UTC

mathetic wrote: post #152

curuinor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file. Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn't like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I've heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.

He likes computers, he even likes AI. He doesn't buy into Ray Kurzweil's ideas about singularity [0,1]. He also (as I understand) is in Chomsky school of statistical learning as opposed to Peter Norvig (or Google) school [1,2]. Those two are highly unpopular stances to have these days, so I can see how that can be confused with not liking computers/AI. If you read GEB, you can see in different chapters that he is a b…

Post by JelteF » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:35 PM UTC

lebca wrote: post #191

JelteF wrote: post #79

Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter. It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to a…

While I have not read the book, when I've spoken about it to reputable Bach musicologists and logicians, one group says Hofstadter misinterprets Bach's work and tries to create something that actually isn't there while the other says he oversimplifies Gödel's work to the point that it is uninteresting and misleading. I haven't found a visual artist who's read it to discuss the Escher parts. These opinions steered me…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:42 PM UTC

ci5er wrote: post #119

bluGill wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have a copy of DP and have not read the whole thing. Most people have read it in that they have read a couple pages, the table of contents, and a couple random patterns. To some extent that is how the book should be read: you have a problem that a DP solves and so you read the section on that pattern to get it right. The problem is most people have a superficial knowledge of the patterns in the book (a li…

> However few people realize that a singleton is a fancy name for a global variable and have all the downsides of a global variable. Really? It's been twenty years (maybe a bit more?) since I read the book, but I think this was pretty explicit, was it not?

Post by vithlani » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 10:46 PM UTC

40acres wrote: post #120

JelteF wrote: post #79

Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter. It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to a…

I bought this book a few months ago, it's been sitting on my shelf because of its intimidating size (plus the fact that I have a few other books I want to work through) but this review has definitely bumped it up my reading list.