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Quirky computing books

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Re: Quirky computing books

#101
I am a bit late at the game but let me contribute this:

Programming Pearls - by Jon L. Bentley (1986) ISBN:9780201103311

It's an amazing collection of... small stories (the chapters were originally published as ACM articles I believe). Nowadays they read like a crossover between Codegolf and Martin Fowler's collected articles, but I still like to pull by paper copy out every 10 years or so and reread it.

(There was also a second volume, and I believe a "re-edition" published in year 2000, but I'd go for the original for its specific charm).

Re: Quirky computing books

#102
post #38
post #32

Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van-Linden/d... Entertaining and informative. Highly recommended.

It was a brilliant book, but I feel it's too stuck in the early 90s to recommend today. It's a pity.

Could you explain a bit more about why you feel its outdated and if there's a quirky book for modern C?

Re: Quirky computing books

#103
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would it be this one ? https://books.google.es/books?id=tpaeeqefEG4C&pg=PA363&lpg=P... Computers in Education: Prolog as a Cognitive Tool page 368 has a few stuff around "Alice in Wonderland"

That looks like a pretty cool book. It is not the one I used though: the entire book was Alice in Wonderland themed.

Following the numbered citation, I think this is the table of contents from a different book, originally published in Finnish by Jaak Henno, which would have an English title something like “It is simple with Prolog!”. He also seems to have published some of the content separately under the title “Prolog and Olympic Gods”.

http://staff.ttu.ee/~jaak.henno/publicat.htm

Re: Quirky computing books

#104

If you are into quirky books, take a look at http://t3x.org For example: Scheme 9 from Empty Space ( http://t3x.org/s9book/ ), LISP from Nothing ( http://t3x.org/lfn/ ), but also Write Your Own Compiler ( http://t3x.org/t3x/book.html ).

I appreciate the effort but other than the play on Ed woods movie title, I'm not exactly sure what makes this book "quirky". Skimming through the first dozen pages available for free, it struck me as a relatively academic and dry treatise on scheme.

Re: Quirky computing books

#105
post #4

My 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…

How long ago did you check it out? If it was recent enough, then the library you checked it out from would have record of it. I'd love to know what the book was!

I've searched and searched and can't find any Prolog book that matches this description. Hopefully you're able to find or remember it.

Re: Quirky computing books

#106
post #105
post #4

My 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…

How long ago did you check it out? If it was recent enough, then the library you checked it out from would have record of it. I'd love to know what the book was! I've searched and searched and can't find any Prolog book that matches this description. Hopefully you're able to find or remember it.

Unfortunately it’s been about a decade and the library is in another state from where I now live. I did another round of searching myself and couldn’t turn anything up either :/

Re: Quirky computing books

#107
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a brilliant book, but I feel it's too stuck in the early 90s to recommend today. It's a pity.

Could you explain a bit more about why you feel its outdated and if there's a quirky book for modern C?

The other commenter said that it's a joy to read and that's certainly true. If you're interested in software folk tales and such, it's worth getting.

I still see it recommended as a practical book however and indeed the book bills itself as "the second book you need on C", the book that will cover topics that other C books don't explain or explain poorly. But it's much too outdated to serve that purpose. In practice it means chapters discussing differences between K&R C and ANSI C and deep-dives into details of SunOS and MS-DOS compilers.

Some of the material has become misleading because the C language has evolved. For example, there's a lot of discussion about pointers and arrays, as can be expected. But there's no mention of strict aliasing and pointer provenance (these rules existed in C89, but compilers at the time didn't exploit them yet for optimization). And of course no variable-length arrays (introduced in C99). So you're not going to learn what you need to know in today's world.

The book also has almost no discussion about safety. The Morris worm is mentioned, but just as a piece of historical trivia. Browsing it now, I don't even find any discussion about buffer overflows.

Re: Quirky computing books

#108

Leo Brodie, Starting FORTH (First Edition): available as a free PDF from FORTH Inc. here - https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/ One of my favorite books ever.

I have a book on Forth, which I currently can't remember the title or author of but it had a blue cover a bit like Starting FORTH (I'm pretty sure it wasn't this) but was typeset on a 7-pin dot-matrix printer. Literally all the body copy is dot-matrix.

I think it's in storage just now :-/

Re: Quirky computing books

#109
post #33

Braitenberg, "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology", 1984. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262521121/ This was one of the required books in Leslie Kaelbling's intro AI or robotics courses. The preview on Amazon might cut a little too early before (IIRC) some seemingly complex behavior emerging from very simple mechanics really clicks.

"The Nature of Code" by Daniel Shiffman is a wonderful book that counts Vehicles as one of its inspirations.

https://natureofcode.com/book/

Re: Quirky computing books

#110
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain a bit more about why you feel its outdated and if there's a quirky book for modern C?

The other commenter said that it's a joy to read and that's certainly true. If you're interested in software folk tales and such, it's worth getting. I still see it recommended as a practical book however and indeed the book bills itself as "the second book you need on C", the book that will cover topics that other C books don't explain or explain poorly. But it's much too outdated to serve that purpose. In practice…

Thanks for taking the time to explain your comment.
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