1) The Art of Computer Programming 2) The Art of Computer Programming 3) The Art of Computer Programming 4A) The Art of Computer Programming
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Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
41–50 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#42Anything about Complex Adaptive Systems. Holland’s short intro is nice.
Eventually you’re going to be faced with a very complex system to refactor. It helps to understand the principles of healthy complex systems in nature.
https://www.amazon.com/Complexity-Very-Short-Introduction-In...
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, "The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement" by Eli Goldratt, almost certainly was the inspiration for The Phoenix Project, and is IMHO a better read. One could follow up with any of Goldratt's other books for more information about the Theory of Constraints.
In a sense, I agree with you, but TPP is specific to a software organization and I find it "translates" better, especially to the inexperienced.
You make a compelling argument that making the information accessible is more important than the means of conveyance.
This is a good point for many books listed in this thread: it doesn't matter how you pick up the design pattern knowledge, the algorithm knowledge, the code quality knowledge, etc etc, so long as you get it, and with complete understanding.
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#44Three boks I'll recommend you read as soon as possible. 1) The Mythical Man month 3) The Pragmatic Programmer 3) Code Complete. The thing about these books, well atleast 1 and 3 is that when they were written they broke new ground. Or if that phrase bother you, they were the first mainstream publications that brought their core ideas to developers. Reading these books early in your career will help cement these best…
I read through Code Complete 2 cover to cover my first year and I agree with parent it's more useful early on than later. There's a lot of discussion around best practices; I think there's an entire chapter on strategic whitespace. All the stuff in there makes sense, but it cements why it's important.
Definitely check out "The Pragmatic Programmer"! There's definitely some good nuggets in there that helped me. Distinguishing full-blown prototypes vs. prototypical kernels that can be productionized, a.k.a. tracer bullet prototyping, is one.
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#45Our field is so varied that there is no good answer to this question unless you specify what you want to focus on. Some people are inevitably going to recommend The Art of Computer Programming , which hardly anyone has read and isn't that relevant to the work that 99% of us are doing. Someone will probably recommend The C Programming Language , also called K&R after the authors, but again it's not very useful unless…
"The C Programming Language" is a good read if you intend to write a book. It is well written so you should read it for inspiration on how to make your book good.
If you want to learn C - there are plenty of resources that work just as well. The good ones cover things that didn't exist back then. (I've only read the original K&R from before ANSI, not one of the latter edition(s) so I can't comment on how up to date the latest version is)
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#461) The Art of Computer Programming 2) The Art of Computer Programming 3) The Art of Computer Programming 4A) The Art of Computer Programming
Has anyone really read these books from page to page? Also, are they really relevant when you are starting your career? These seem more into the category of making you competent in the field of algorithms research, rather than something a person starting a career should read.
> Has anyone really read these books from page to page?
I recently finished reading the first three, and have started on the fourth (with a detour to read "fascicle 1.1 on MMIX"). I started the series planning to work every single problem. That turned out to be just a little unrealistically ambitious - I settled for _attempting_ every single problem except for the "unsolved research problems" (in some cases, just figuring out what the problem was asking for left me with a sense of accomplishment). Even so, I ended up spending a year on each volume, reading/working problems for a half hour a day or so. On the one hand, I loved these books, and really enjoyed reading/working through them, but - recommended before beginning one's software development career? You'll need to know a fair amount of calculus to make sense of a lot of it, and it'll take quite a while to get through. It's questionable how relevant it really is, fascinating as the subject matter is.
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#47The Practice of Programming by K & R. Or has this fallen out of favor?
It is by K&P, not K&R. Great book though.
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#48There are many books which sound good in theory but I think my younger self would not have been able to make use of the wisdom in those books because I did not have the experience to relate to what the book was talking about. Nevertheless, if I had to ignore this factor, I too, like many others in this thread, recommend "The Mythical Man Month". However, I think, it's more important to figure out what one wants from…
If we're going meta, I'd add Ecclesiastes (yes, from the Bible). Doesn't matter whether you're religious--this was also a favorite of noted atheist Christopher Hitchens, for example.
The basic theme is that everything is ephemeral. This really starts to resonate when you see how fast the results of your labors over a period of decades fade, turn to dust, and are utterly forgotten. As you yourself will be in short order. Ultimate medicine for keeping things in perspective.
Here's a particularly readable paraphrase: https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-New-Under-Sun-Ecclesiastes/dp...
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#49As far as a technical book, Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman. This book covers distributed systems as well as databases, data-warehousing, and data-processing.
A lot of tools and patterns you don't see in school that describe how most of the "magic" behind high-powered software we use is implemented.
Re: Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
#501) The Art of Computer Programming 2) The Art of Computer Programming 3) The Art of Computer Programming 4A) The Art of Computer Programming
Has anyone really read these books from page to page? Also, are they really relevant when you are starting your career? These seem more into the category of making you competent in the field of algorithms research, rather than something a person starting a career should read.
I've read 3 pages and I started on one exercise: I'm the better for it. Someday I hope to find the energy to read 3 more pages. If I'm really energetic I'll attempt another exercise as well.