Quirky computing books
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Quirky computing books
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Re: Quirky computing books
#2Very cool, first HN post in a while that I think I’ll favorite.
I love random books about obscure or niche technical subjects, but I usually only find them accidentally.
Re: Quirky computing books
#3I’m surprised he hadn’t added “Land of Lisp”.
Re: Quirky computing books
#4My favorite quirky computing book was something I found in the library by chance at my university when I should've been attending a Principles of Programming Languages course.
We'd been learning Prolog in class for the past two weeks but I'm terrible at learning from lectures, so eventually I decided it'd be a better use of my time to locate a book I could teach myself from rather than doodling in class.
IIRC it hadn't been checked out since the 80's: it was a slim volume on Prolog with an Alice in Wonderland theme. I can't remember the title or anything, but it was an enjoyable read, and effective: I still hadn't written any Prolog at the time of the exam—which I remember was 4 days out at the time I picked up the book— but I understood it well enough by then to solve all the problems without flaw including some extra credit challenge problem :)
Has anyone else come across this book?
Re: Quirky computing books
#5Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby (and pretty much anything else by _why)
Let's Talk Lisp, by Laurent Siklóssy
Robots On Your Doorstep, by Nels Winkless and Iben Browning
Re: Quirky computing books
#6No _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby? That's like, maximum quirk. Zooey Deschanel can pose with that book in her hands and not look out of character.
Re: Quirky computing books
#7I’m surprised he hadn’t added “Land of Lisp”.
I think (based on the books he lists), he's not talking about books with a quirky presentation (like "Land of Lisp" or "Learn You a Haskell For Great Good") but rather a quirky topic. Expert systems are already a bit of a niche topic these days (not the trendy part of AI) but writing expert systems in FORTH of all things...
Re: Quirky computing books
#8I think one of the first "quirky" computer books I can remember is a user manual for the Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer from the 1980s. It was written in a much more relaxed, personable style than almost any other computer books of the time. https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/printers...
Re: Quirky computing books
#9My favorite quirky computing book was something I found in the library by chance at my university when I should've been attending a Principles of Programming Languages course. We'd been learning Prolog in class for the past two weeks but I'm terrible at learning from lectures, so eventually I decided it'd be a better use of my time to locate a book I could teach myself from rather than doodling in class. IIRC it hadn…
Have you checked Libgen sorted by year[0]. There are several Prolog books from the 80s. Maybe the one you looking for is there.
[0]http://libgen.is/search.php?&req=Prolog&phrase=1&view=simple...
Re: Quirky computing books
#10One more quirky computing book:
"Elementary Basic, as chronicled by John H. Watson" (1982)
https://archive.org/details/elementarybasica00ledg/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/elementarybasica0000unse/mode/2u...
(They're amongst the archive.org books that need to be "borrowed", unfortunately. First few pages including the index can be browsed freely though.)