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Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

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Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#21

Post by kamechan »

T-R wrote: post #6

It really depends on what you feel you're missing and what you're hoping to do (definitions of "daily work" vary widely). If you're looking to get up on theory by doing your own program of sorts, you could do worse than start with these (in roughly this order): Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman Introduction to Algorithms - Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein The Art of…

i'd probably put some kind of ordering on these.

start with algorithm analysis and basic data structures etc in CLRS. (ch 3,4,10,11,12) and then go back and fill in the more advanced concepts. dasgupta, papadimitriou, vazirani is good too http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html

for the compilers book, it's necessary to go through the assembly, and some of sipser (need DFA/NFA/context free grammars), as well as structure and interpretation of computer programs.

OS could come after the algorithms and preferably after assembly but before the compilers book.

Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#22

Post by T-R »

kamechan wrote: post #21
T-R wrote: post #6

It really depends on what you feel you're missing and what you're hoping to do (definitions of "daily work" vary widely). If you're looking to get up on theory by doing your own program of sorts, you could do worse than start with these (in roughly this order): Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman Introduction to Algorithms - Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein The Art of…

i'd probably put some kind of ordering on these. start with algorithm analysis and basic data structures etc in CLRS. (ch 3,4,10,11,12) and then go back and fill in the more advanced concepts. dasgupta, papadimitriou, vazirani is good too http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html for the compilers book, it's necessary to go through the assembly, and some of sipser (need DFA/NFA/context free grammars), as w…

Good idea, I'll do that.

Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#23

Post by nikcub »

I am also self-taught, although I dropped out of University two years into a CompSci/Engineering double major, so I will recommend some resources to you that helped me immensely. Each of these books has an associated MIT course with lecture video, notes, etc. available online.

First is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs[1], which you can read online, and the associated course at MIT, which is 6.001[2]

Second is the famous 'Dragon Book', Compilers: Principals, Techniques and Tools[3] and the associated course which is 6.035[4]

Extras would be the Python book 'How to think like a Computer Scientist'[5]. MIT course 6.00[6] uses the book as a reference, and the courseware is again available online.

Other than that - the usual suspects on learning C (K&R), UNIX (TAOUP[7]), the bash shell along with grep, sed, awk, more algorithms(CLRS[8]), functional programming and machine learning. Take your time, it takes years to build the relevant experience and knowledge and you are never done.

I love the MIT courses. Work and learn at your own rate. I feel that it is important to implement all the code yourself even if it looks easy in a lecture - there are little things you pick up as you write algorithms out.

Even though I had worked through SICP I still watched all the lectures again and implemented all the examples with benchmarks and unit tests. I usually set aside one day on the weekend to work on study, and usually an extra evening or two mid-week to read papers and books. Once you get into the routine it is great.

It might be the best approach to set yourself a timetable and weekly schedule, just like in UNI (ie. every Saturday plus Tuesday and Thursday nights) and work through the MIT courseware and associated books in order (6.00, 6.001, 6.035). The more advanced MIT courseware is an excellent bonus.

[1] http://xrl.us/sicp

[2] http://xrl.us/6001

[3] http://xrl.us/dragonbook

[4] http://xrl.us/6035

[5] http://xrl.us/thinkcs

[6] http://xrl.us/6000

[7] http://xrl.us/artunix

[8] http://xrl.us/clrs

Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#26

Post by T-R »

kamechan wrote: post #4

functional stuff is making a comeback. haskell can be daunting in its pure-ness sometimes, requiring monads for seemingly anything useful. but it's a wonderful language/lifestyle choice. this online book broaches the subject pretty well: http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

If you want to go down the Functional rabbit hole more, "Purely Functional Data Structures" by Chris Okasaki would be a good next step. There's a book and a paper - from what I hear, the paper is just Okasaki's original work, whereas the book is a more complete coverage of the field.

Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#27

Post by tom_b »

T-R wrote: post #13
microtonal wrote: post #9

The standard for computational grammars and parsers in natural language processing is: Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis - Fernando C. N. Pereira and Stuart M. Shieber The PDF is available from the publisher: http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/prolog-digital.pdf It also serves as a great introduction to Prolog and logics programming.

I've heard "The Art of Prolog" is good, too... a quick glance at Amazon shows it to be ridiculously expensive, though.

Hit up your local college library. Mine has a copy of it and it has been there every time I've gone by to check it out.

Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#28

Post by dragonquest »

Over the years I've found the following CS books helpful, but only a minority in my day-to-day work. Your mileage may vary, as would the utility of these to you.

Algorithms -> Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Wirth (worth its weight in gold if you can get past the Pascal syntax)

OS -> Operating System Concepts by Silberschatz et al (The dinosaur book)

CS Theory -> Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft, Ullman

Programming Languages Theory -> Programming languages: design and implementation by Pratt et al

Database Theory -> Database Design by Wiederhold

Architecture -> Structured Computer Organization by Andrew S Tanenbaum

Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#29

Post by deong »

T-R wrote: post #13
microtonal wrote: post #9

The standard for computational grammars and parsers in natural language processing is: Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis - Fernando C. N. Pereira and Stuart M. Shieber The PDF is available from the publisher: http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/prolog-digital.pdf It also serves as a great introduction to Prolog and logics programming.

I've heard "The Art of Prolog" is good, too... a quick glance at Amazon shows it to be ridiculously expensive, though.

It is quite good, and the hardcover version is beautiful as well -- good enough to be a coffee table book. But yeah, $250 is pretty steep.

Re: Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers

#30

Post by deong »

jdj wrote: post #18

One book that I would suggest to anyone is Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation - HMU. It is very approachable and presents some very interesting topics (so you won't write a regex for matching HTML and will learn what P vs NP means). On a more practical side, I think that a must read for machine learning is Tom Mitchell - Machine Learning . Another book that from what I've heard is easier to d…

The Mitchell book is definitely showing its age these days. It's not terrible, but anyone thinking of buying it should be aware that it is a broad but shallow tour of machine learning as it stood 15 years ago, and machine learning as a field has changed significantly since then. Most notably, there has been something of a Bayesian revolution that Mitchell basically ignores (understandable since the book predates it).

Don't take this as a recommendation, because I haven't read it, but Stephen Marsland's Machine Learning book appears from a glance at the table of contents to be a much more modern attempt to provide the same type of coverage as Mitchell. But again, I can't speak to its quality.

Chris Bishop's Pattern Recognition book is also very good, but it's not the same sort of book. Bishop is exhaustively deep on the narrower range of ML that he covers, but you won't get the same sort of coverage of the wider view of the field.

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