The Book That Every Programmer Should HAVE Read EARLY.
The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#32I graduated w/ a degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering with a minor in CompSci. From the review, this sounds like all the stuff I learned that wasn't CompSci, distilled into an easy-to-read form. Stuff like flip-flops, RISC assembly, how memory works, etc. It sounds fantastic. Having the benefit of an EE based undergrad degree was awesome for this reason, esp. since my first job was firmware design. The downsid…
It's somewhat the other way around for me: I got to study logic, discrete math, functional programming and OO, but I feel I missed out on stuff like electronics.
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#33alright, meh, not convinced. we're all busy people and my bedside book stack is 12 high.
compare books like CODE, SICP, and related books discussed below, to books like Beautiful Code, Higher Order Perl, Mythical Man Month, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, tons of whitepapers.
do I really need to read CODE? Seems like a bottom-of-stack book that will never quite make it to the top.
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#34The book every programmer should read is Programming Pearls, isn't it? :-)
I wish there was a modern version of _Software Tools_ -- the Pascal version is dated, and the RATFOR version might as well be on stone tablets.
(I'm guessing some recent Unix-programming-environment books cover a lot of the stuff in _ST_, but I haven't read 'em).
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#35Sounds a lot like my Digital Circuits course in university. We started with a breadboard of transistors, and after we built each component we got that component as an IC to build the next level of abstraction (flip-flop → memory → adder → processor → etc) . At the end we ended up with a fully programmable computer that we were tasked to program as a sensor-driven traffic light controller. Seeing every step from the g…
Same here, although our "computer" was an FPGA.
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I firmly believe that every programmer should be able to read and write C to some extent, and to learn it one must read K&R. So, yes, I agree that it is also one of the books that every programmer should read.
Curious why you think that? Every programmer? What does learning C provide that other programming languages (majority of which have some basis in C) don't teach you? Memory management (allocation, pointers, etc)? Pipes and buffers? They are present in other languages, and one could argue with memory management why 'every' programmer must learn those techniques even if they are never really applicable to them. I'm rea…
C and some limited amount of assembly are what drive most of the electronics that surround you; most of the of "smart" devices in your house, car and pocket contain large amounts of code written in C. The phone infrastructure you use, the traffic signals, the network you get news from, the browser you're using right now? C.
Scripting languages and bytecode-driven languages? Their interpreters and jitters are likely written in C.
There are exceptions. I understand that some Java-based systems are built in Java, all the way to the metal. Apple was a Pascal shop until it turned to C in the late 80s. By and large these are systems on the fringe, and the bulk of the heavy lifting today is done in C.
You should probably understand it.
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#37alright, meh, not convinced. we're all busy people and my bedside book stack is 12 high. compare books like CODE, SICP, and related books discussed below, to books like Beautiful Code, Higher Order Perl, Mythical Man Month, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, tons of whitepapers. do I really need to read CODE? Seems like a bottom-of-stack book that will never quite make it to the top.
I wouldn't say that you should read it, that depends on your priorities.
But the truth is that the benefit/effort ratio in that book is pleasantly high. It is very easy to read and it did gave me quite some "Oh! So that is how it works!"
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#38While this book sounds like it would cover a lot of what someone might have missed in a CS program if they were not very inquisitive, I picked that stuff up, and continue to do so as i forget by going back and looking things up.
My vote for must read is: "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - Pirsig
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#39Petzold gave a great keynote at CodeStock 2011 on analog computing, but it seems no one recorded it.
Here's a link to an interview of him that briefly covers some of the topics in his keynote. http://technologyandfriends.com/archive/2011/06/13/tf160.asp...
Re: The Book That Every Programmer Should Read
#40Came for K&R, left disappointed. I often recommend K&R, even to those who aren't primarily learning C.
I respectfully disagree.
K&R is a book that influenced me a lot, but its most important lesson is not laid down very explicitly. IMHO, this lesson is its notion of programming style: terse, small, efficient. It permeates the whole book and C/Unix design but the book is not explicitly about it.
Unfortunately it is a lost lesson. Today, programming became just the act of gluing bloated frameworks, libraries and doing severs configuration. The small, simple and powerful K&R approach is totally lost in a world dominated by bloatware (e.g: Java/.Net/Boost).