Dijkstra’s A Discipline of Programming and its spiritual successor that he did with Scholten Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics. They changed how I think about programming.
Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
61–70 of 270 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#62Neuromancer
Snow Crash
Blindsight
(Just some fun fiction to bolster one's passion for their chosen profession. Obviously TAOCP, SICP, K&R, and other books in their ranks are better answers.)
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#63Vision science: Foundation of vision
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#64Principles of Neural Science by Kandel et al Molecular Biology of The Cell by Alberts et al Janeway’s Immunobiology Robbin’s Pathologic Basis of Disease All of these books are extraordinary in their sheer ability to organize thousands of small details into thematic narratives of how life operates. They also reveal how hard we humans try to narrate life into tidy, comprehensible themes. These books are all of an era (…
Robbin's was great. Read it cover to cover many times in medical school.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#65The Jazz Theory book - Mark Levine High Performance Browser Networking - edit: Ilya Grigorik Effortless Mastery - Kenny werner
Wow, never expected The Jazz Theory Book or Effortless Mastery to show up on HN. I'll add The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine and Jamey Abersold vol. 1 How To Play Jazz and Improvise
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#66Since I'm into online search algorithms:
"Flexible pattern matching in strings" by Gonzalo Navarro and Mathieu Raffinot.
A rare book that marries the theoretical and practical. It has good worked examples.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/flexible-pattern-matchi...
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#67Types and programming languages, Benjamin Pierce: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/ Its contents is what I consider the meta game of programming. Understanding types seems to be a real boost to think about architecture, implementation, etc.
It’s also surprisingly approachable, unlike most serious mathematical-logic(-adjacent) books. The three-page elementary treatment of the Knaster–Tarski fixed point theorem is worth reading even if you’re interested in cases for which it’s not sufficient (seriously infinite or order-theoretic things).
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#68Classical Electrodynamics By Jackson Numerical Recipes By William H. Press et al Quantum Theory of Materials By Kaxiras
> Classical Electrodynamics By Jackson
I'm so sorry. You have my sympathy.
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#69Types and programming languages, Benjamin Pierce: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/ Its contents is what I consider the meta game of programming. Understanding types seems to be a real boost to think about architecture, implementation, etc.
I'm tripping on the first sentence of the blurb:
> A type system is a syntactic method for enforcing levels of abstraction in programs.
Why is it called a syntactic method? Because type errors are caught at compile time, by analyzing the source code?
Re: Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
#70("Data and Reality")[ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1753248.Data_and_Reality ] - despite its age (written before SQL was mainstream) it remains a short, accessible read that lays out how to think about modeling an information schema, particularly where the same piece of information may be used in separate parts of the organisation.
If reading Data and Reality, please read the 2nd edition [1] (the 3rd edition has a co-author who replaced half the stuff with his own "notes"). The 2nd edition is out of print but you can get a PDF here [2]
[1] https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/why-you-should-... [2] https://github.com/jhulick/bookstuff/blob/master/Data%20and%...