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Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

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Re: Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

#31

Post by kls »

andrewcooke wrote: post #18

ok, looking at programming language pragmatics it seems like you want fairly serious (university level) theory. so i don't understand why people are talking about regexps - that should be covered in a subsection (regular grammars) of one chapter of that book. anyway, for databases i would suggest date's "sql and relational theory" - it shows how sql is related to a more elegant, cleaner, underlying theoretical approa…

so i don't understand why people are talking about regexps

The author of the post made mention of the knowledge applying to web development and then said the following towards the end of the post:

the difference would be in a higher focus on practical application

Regular Expressions is kind of the tl;dr on the topic. They are practical to web development but require a deeper understanding of a particular area of computing.

I took his post to say, I want to go deep, I want it to be applicable to real world web development, and I want it to be targeted topics. I think regular expressions fit that bill. Sure there are others, and maybe some overlap but I personally mentioned regular expressions because it has a high degree of misunderstanding, but also a high degree of usefulness in web development.

Re: Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

#32

Post by LukeShu »

PaulYoder wrote: post #20

Learn by doing. Get involved in some open source projects and start contributing. Doing that has taught me more than any book has.

This, one thousand fold.

A lot of projects on the "Get Involved" page or whatever, have a list of "prerequisite' knowledge. Don't let this intimidate you, often playing with the source is a much better way to learn about the subject than trying to research that topic, feel you understand it, then looking at the source.

Re: Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

#33

Post by klt0825 »

I have been keeping a list of books I used to augment my CS Masters Degree courses on various topics, here are the relevant ones I have found useful for the topics you have listed:

--Computer Organization--:

Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Randal-Br...

I liked this much better than Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy which everyone has encountered at some point. The developer-centric view was very cool.

--Computer Security--:

Kernel Exploitation: Attacking the Core http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Kernel-Exploitation-Attacking-Co...

Most 'hacking' books are goofy. This one is very good and doubles nicely as a hackers operating systems text.

Web Application Hackers Handbook http://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Hackers-Handbook-Disco...

Very nice overview for web concerns.

--Operating Systems-:

Operating System Design and Implementation http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Design-Implementatio...

I don't agree with Tanenbaum's views on micro vs. monolithic kernels but this book is a great mix of theory and implementation.

Linux Kernel Devleopment http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Robert-Love/d...

I used this to get a feel for the monolithic implementations of topics covered by Tanenbaum.

--Networking--:

TCP/IP Illustrated Series. More than you would ever want to know.

Re: Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

#34

Post by BadassFractal »

PaulYoder wrote: post #20

Learn by doing. Get involved in some open source projects and start contributing. Doing that has taught me more than any book has.

I don't think you need to necessarily choose one or the other. I've gotten a lot out of texts that give you practical assignments that get you thinking about what you just learned.

I feel that learning in general is an iterative alternation between theory and practice. At the end of the day if you get both sides of that coin, you're doing fine.

Re: Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

#35

Post by marchdown »

If you're serious about fundamentals be sure to at least skim Fieldings's PhD thesis[1] which lays the ground work for HTTP, especially the chapter on REST. His ideas are powerful, clear and very influential, but have been misunderstood time and again.

[1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

Re: Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

#36

Post by BadassFractal »

stiff wrote: post #9

From my experience what people working as web developers most commonly lack theory-wise besides simply software engineering skills is in-depth knowledge of HTTP and it's guiding architectural principles (REST), so I would recommend: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.txt (HTTP standard) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm (Or…

I think it's really good advice. I was relegated exclusively to the backend for a while and so I had a terrible understanding of some of those concepts. Spending some time on Rails led to inevitable tangential learning of HTTP and REST, which really opened my eyes about the bigger picture.

Same thing about JavaScript, as you said, it's the language of the web and needs to be mastered. I was pretty abstracted from it for the longest time, but just yesterday a website I had to use was misbehaving and I managed to track down the issue right away with the Chrome tools. It's really empowering, although I'm still far from being proficient.

Re: Ask HN: Fundamental texts for serious web engineers?

#37

Post by BadassFractal »

skunkworks wrote: post #7
skunkworks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link to the 2nd Edition version of this book: http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wesl... (Didn't even realize it had been updated until I checked!)

BTW, if you decide you want the Kindle version, there's a $10 promo code. I'm not sure if you need to be signed up to Amazon Student for this, so YMMV: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...

Worked for me, thanks!
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