Ask HN: Older textbooks/papers you consider classics still worth studying today?

"The Design of the UNIX operating system" by Bach holds up well. Feynman's lectures on physics (3 volume set). Electrodynamics by Jackson is also up there.

Yes, this is the classic. PDF could be found in bittorrent

General Chemistry by Linus Pauling.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Philosophy).

Modern Higher Algebra by A. Adrian Albert (1937, Dover/Cambridge). It covers both abstract algebra and linear algebra.

Most modern textbooks tend to approach linear algebra from geometric perspectives. Albert's text is one of the few that introduce the subject in a purely algebraic approach. With a solid algebraic foundation, the author was able to produce some elegant proofs or results that you don't often see in modern texts.

E.g. Albert's proof of Cayley-Hamilton theorem is essentially a one-liner. Some modern textbooks (such as Jim Hefferon's Linear Algebra) try to reproduce the same proof, but without setting up the proper algebraic framework, their proofs become much longer and much harder to understand. Readers of these modern textbooks may not realize that the theorem is simply a direct consequence of Factor Theorem for polynomials over non-commutative rings.

With only about 300 pages, the book's coverage is amazingly wide. When I first read the table of content, I was surprised to see that it not only covers undergraduate topics such as group, ring, field and Galois theory, but also advanced topics such as p-adic numbers. I haven't read the part on abstract algebra in details. However, if you want to re-learn linear algebra, this book may be an excellent choice.

Great book. Do get the most recent edition, because the recommend parts in the older ones are quite outdated.