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Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
161–170 of 344 posts
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#162Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter is about the intersection of music, math, and computers.
And it's playful. It seems like, 20+ years ago, there were a lot more authors who wrote playful tech books. I miss 'em.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#163SQL Performance Explained - Markus Winand - Excellent book that gets into the internals of what developers need to know about SQL and covers each part as it relates to the 4 major SQL databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL) - Also has an online version: http://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/table-of-contents The Code Book - Simon Singh - It's just a good read that covers cryptography and message hiding throughout…
+1 for SQL Performance Explained. One of the best vendor agnostic resources for understanding how databases work.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#164Any good book on statistics would be a huge asset, as well as a book about debugging strategies.
> as well as a book about debugging strategies Any examples of books focused on that? I can't think of any.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#165Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. I love this book.
This is an amazing book. Hard to describe, and maybe not even all that interesting sounding if you managed to describe it accurately, it’s actually fascinating.
If you don’t know much about hardware (and maybe even if you do) it’ll change the way you think about computing devices.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#166If you consider C to be language-agnostic, here are some gems. These are personal favorites as much for their excellent writing as for their content. The Unix Programming Environment was published in 1984. I read it over 20 years later and was astonished at how well it had aged. For a technical book from the 80's, it is amazingly lucid and well-written. It pre-dates modern unix, so things have changed but much that g…
+1 to Code (Petzold). I would absolutely start with that. One of my favorite books. The build a computer course from coursera (https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer) is the natural next step after reading code.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#167Not really programming books, but these have helped me with programming jobs. -How to make friends and influence people. Anyone who works collaboratively with people needs to be able to communicate effectively. -The Elements of style. Writing understandable code is similar to any other type of writing.
> How to make friends and influence people I swear I've had this book recommended to me at least a thousand times, I'm almost suspicious though I don't know that suspicious is the right word
Read it. It's great.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#168Some of the most interesting books I've read in support of my software-development work are: * "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools" by Aho et al. (i.e., "the dragon book") * "Data Flow Analysis: Theory and Practice" by Khedker et al. * "Understanding MySQL Internals" by Sasha Pachev. * "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" by Gray and Reuter. * "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication" by Tse and V…
Don't read the dragon book if you're interested in compilers. It's lex and parse heavy, and is not up to date with more recent best practice on codegen. Further, the lex and parse end of it is focused on the kind of theory you need to build tools like lex and yacc, rather than stuff you need to know if you want to write a compiler.
For a good intro of modern back end development, check out Engineering a Compiler. It's also got the lexical and parsing end of things, but a bit better done, but still quite theoretical.
One of the best books I read on programming is "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming"; it's not strictly speaking language agnostic, based as it is on Oz, but Oz isn't a language you'd ever use in production and is a reasonable base to introduce you to ways of programming that will probably be completely unfamiliar, like constraint programming, dataflow, concurrent logic, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#169Practical Object-oriented Design in Ruby is a great read with a lot of advice on approaching design problems, approaching refactoring and thinking about how to model. It's in Ruby but I feel a lot of its advice is general.
aka "Why duck typing is better than inheritance". Yes, great book, but if you're using a language that doesn't support duck typing, some of the concepts will frustrate you and make you wish you were using Ruby instead.
Re: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
#170One that hasn't been mentioned yet: "Coders at Work". A very enlightening book about how some of the best programmers in the world approach the craft in their own words.
Also noteworthy in that series is Founders at Work, and Gamers at Work.