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Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

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Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

#1

Post by oscardelben »

There are many wonderful programming books that I would like to read and understand. Here are some examples:

* PAIP (Paradigms of artificial intelligence programming) * SICP (I read this but didn't complete ALL the exercises) * TAOCP * Others?

The problem is that each of these books would take me months to go through, but that's ok for me because I know that the benefits are enormous.

My question is: which one would you study first? Are there any other books that I should read first? My goals with programming is to create web and desktop (mac, iphone) apps if that's relevant.

Re: Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

#3

Post by oscardelben »

arethuza wrote: post #2

I'm probably showing my age, but to me the all time classics are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_%28b...

I've read the mythical man month already. I've not yet read the C programming language though.

Re: Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

#5

Post by michael_dorfman »

First of all, if SICP would take you months to go through, TAOCP will take you years-- let's not kid ourselves.

That being said: I'd definitely start with SICP, for one reason: the video lectures, available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

They'll take you about 20 hours to go through, and as far as I am concerned, are the best introduction to Computer Science you can get in that short a time-frame.

Re: Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

#6

Post by rsaarelm »

Given your goals, you might want start by reading books like The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete cover-to-cover, and taking it easier with the theory books. You want your basic software development skills to be solid before you start going into proving algorithm complexities.

Beyond that, off the top of my head the number one theory book for working programmers would be Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and the new guy.

Re: Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

#8

Post by edw519 »

My goals with programming is to create web and desktop (mac, iphone) apps if that's relevant.

Then you have it backwards. You should be building, not reading.

Slow way: Read book --> apply what you learn

Fast way: Write code --> Get stuck --> Find a book

I know this is not intuitive, but trust me, it works much better. We all love the feeling of cracking open a fresh new book (or pdf) and bathing ourselves in all this newfound knowledge. But this method is not very efficient. Much of what you read you will never use and much of what you need you will never read about, no matter what the book is.

Better to pick a project and just start building it. Come up for air every once in a while and consult whatever book fills in what you need to know to build your project. True learning comes from building, not reading. This method takes the best of both worlds and gets you to your stated goal much quicker.

Re: Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

#9

Post by DrJokepu »

oscardelben wrote: post #3
arethuza wrote: post #2

I'm probably showing my age, but to me the all time classics are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_%28b...

I've read the mythical man month already. I've not yet read the C programming language though.

The sooner you learn C the better. It (along with assembly) really helps to develop an understanding of how computers really work on a low level, which will be important later when you will try to write efficient code in high level or functional programming languages.

It's always important to understand what's going on under the hood, even if you don't need to open it.

Re: Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?

#10

Post by buro9 »

Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley ( http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/ ) is a pretty easy read and introduces the reader to algorithms quite nicely. There's a few important takeaways from it in how to approach problems, and it's almost universally applicable (even though almost everyone reels at being presented with Visual Basic in the example code).
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