Book list for streetfighting computer scientists (2022)

Stevens (APUE and Network Programming) doesn't hold up. You'd do better with Beej. They weren't all that great even at the time; what they were were book-length treatments of the topics that you could reasonably expect to find on the shelf in a suburban Borders bookstore. Even the motivation for those books is obsolete!

Varghese is much too situational a book for this list; it's like bringing a trebuchet to your street fight. It's a book about building dedicated middleboxes. You can Google the title and get the PDF of the whole book on the first search result page. I like it a lot but I can't imagine sending anybody to it.

I will give the list this: Hanson is probably the best general-purpose C programming book. Of course, part of that is that almost nobody writes general-purpose programs in C anymore.

Stroustrup, on the other hand, is like being one of those flashy sword fighters in the souk in Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana is just going to shoot you before you make it through the first chapter.

Axler is not the linear algebra book I would take to a street fight. Nobody writes proofs in a street fight. You want Strang.

Maths aside --- you need the exercises at the ends of the chapters to get anywhere with math --- I'm not sure books are really the thing anyways. I can quickly think of things I've learned by doing (and being taught while doing), but not a lot of things I feel like I meaningfully picked up because I read it in a book. Excepting maybe Hanson's C book, which definitely did change the way I wrote C. (Alexandrescu's book changed the way I wrote C++, but it also set me on a rapid trajectory out of C++).

> Stevens (APUE and Network Programming) doesn't hold up.

> They weren't all that great even at the time

I can’t say I agree with this. Stevens’ books have always been a go to for me for ever. They don’t have great coverage on more recent topics like Anycast and Multicast, so probably outdated at this point, but I can’t think of a single author who taught me more about network and unix/posix programming. All of the concepts transferred well into Java and Rust after it for me. I’m eternally grateful for Stevens’ work.

[flagged]

Are there really people who actually read this many textbooks? I read half the textbook “Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms” and it took a couple months. And I had time because I read it for a research project in grad school. I can’t imagine going home after work and grinding these textbooks for years.

i am not sure i agree some of those book are a bit too hardcore

  - Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming
  - Pierce, Types and Programming Languages

And its too unix focused, too systems or low level programming focused there is a lot more to programming than mastering unix and c

I think this list needs

  - A Python book 
  - A SQL book and a Relational DB book
  - Some windows and unix admin books 
  - A book about testing and CI/CD 
  - A book about computer security
  - A Machine Learning book