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A non-standard book list for software developers

mihaiolteanu.me

91–100 of 112 posts

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#91

Good books but still quite standard. Spivak’s is standard on initial calculus courses at universities. If you really wanted non-standard but relevant authors I would add Feyerabend, Kuhn, Kahneman, Dostoyevsky, Borges, Taleb, Montaigne, Popper, Hofstadter, Don Norman, Alexandrescu. Add something about systems of representation by Kierkegaard or Nietzche or some interpretations by later authors.

Hoftstadter is fairly near standard isn't it? Assuming you mean actually reading GEB and not The Mind's I or I Am A Strange Loop . Not generally a course text but very common reading among CS/AI students. Some of whom even read all the way to the end instead of just pretending to! The book I would most recommend software developers read is Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert. It's a l…

Hofstadter's amazing, mind-boggling satirical essay/alternate history A Person Paper on Purity in Language from Metamagical Themas. Much more fun than the title suggests!

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#92
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard of this book, is it actually about designing cities? I'm probably way off but all I can't think of is that once we started designing cities we built crap. Take the UK for example all its beautiful amazing places were built before we had planning offices. They seem to just have evolved.

No, houses. Each "chapter" is just a page (well both sides of a leaf), sort of like The Society of Mind. One example is (paraphrased) "find the nicest spot on the property and don't build on it, because then you'll lose it". Another is "corridors are dead spaces; you move through them, and pretty much ignore them, on your way to do something". Not gospel or absolute rules; rather rules of thumb, or ways to talk about…

Thanks, that sounds really interesting.

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#93

Anyone got a non-standard Distributed Systems book pick? Also a non-standard Concurrency book pick?

Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming by Gregory Andrews. All the three paradigms of Concurrency are treated clearly within one pair of covers.

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#95
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Calculus pick is completely fungible. There are at least two other popular Calc books that different people would say the exact same things about. Euclid as the ideal place to learn logic seems debatable, although I can't think of a better resource off the top of my head. The Xinu OS and LISP recommendations I've never seen before, so those were potentially valuable for me at least.

What book would you recommend for learning practical calculus from? I haven't touched the subject since high school.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660126

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#96

I can't comment on the compsci books (they do seem interesting), but I can comment on the mathematical ones where I have expertise: - Using Euclid is manifestly a really bad idea, since his way of formalizing geometry is not the sharpest. Mathematical logic has developed since Euclid published his book thousands of years ago and Euclidean geometry has been re-formalized a number of times to really flesh out the theor…

> Studying calculus in particular makes little sens for compsci. Rather, graph theory or abstract algebra might be more worthwhile to learn - basically any subject that touches theoretical computer science significantly.

Unless of course you have any interest in machine learning.

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#98
I feel like there must be better mathematics books than those two if what you want is a taste of mathematics. What you get from Euclid is the idea of proofs from a set of axioms, but Euclid in the original is quite a painful way to get introduced to that. And I've never understood the obsession with Spivak. Of all the calculus and analysis books I read, it definitely wasn't up there as anything special.

Not sure what the best books are these days to give people a flavour of university style mathematics. I quite liked Introductory Algebra and Analysis by Geoff Smith when I was teaching first year mathematics years ago but I assume that was published 25 years ago so I imagine has been superseded.

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#99

I don’t understand why old programmers are so much fascinated by lisp. If it would have been good it would have survived today.

Because we were educated before "flavor of the month" JavaScript framework... And because if that we can appreciate elegant and practical tools and ideas. See also emacs and vim.

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#100
post #59

Has anyone here read LISP in small pieces ? I've never used LISP but would still like to read it. Would you recommend it? (it's not cheap, otherwise I'd just buy it without the due diligence)

In my opinion it's verbose and more complicated than necessary. If you just want to understand programming language design with a lispy flavor I would suggest Essentials of Programming Languages by Friedman, Wand (not much theory, scheme implementations of everything) and Design Concepts in Programming Languages by Gifford, Turbak, Sheldon (which uses s-exps to represent ASTs, but otherwise is not lisp centric). If you already know some PL theory and don't care too much about lisp, Bob Harper's Practical Foundations for Programming Languages is great, full of interesting topics (but it doesn't hold your hand as much as the previous two)
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