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A list of free programming books

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Re: A list of free programming books

#61

Post by justin66 »

Fixnum wrote: post #57
justin66 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Sipser's content compare to Ullman's (free) Foundations of Computer Science? http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html As far as x86 assembly goes, I found Kip Irvine's book to be pretty great. (not free) It's not a subject I would want to spend more time on, though.

They're not similar at all. FoCS is mostly about introductory programming and data structures (with a tiny bit about automata). Sipser's book is about computation and complexity - it's comparable to Hopcroft and Ullman's Intro to automata theory, languages, and computation , for which Ullman recommends FoCS or equivalent as a prerequisite.

Interesting. Thanks.

Coincidentally I just signed up for Ullman's Automata course at Coursera. The description makes it seem pretty basic but I'm interested to see what he does with it.

Re: A list of free programming books

#62

Post by justin66 »

aviraldg wrote: post #55
tikhonj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically just the lecture notes for their class bundled up into a book. I took the class it was based off, and, well, it was okay but not great . It lacks any sort of underlying narrative or structure--I think this is common with algorithms texts in general. Probably why I didn't like the course much. It feels like a bunch of disjoint topics held together very loosely by some techniques that get repeated a bit.…

Which book would you recommend for algorithms and data structures instead?

Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual and Kleinberg and Tardos' Algorithm Design are both very nice books. CLRS is very nice, and depending on your personal ethics the Solutions manual for the 2nd edition is pretty easily obtainable online, which might be useful for that despicable and highly discouraged activity known as self-study. Sedgwick's stuff is not bad.

I used Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman's two Algorithms books in class. They are old but extremely good. If you want to buy dead tree books they're available used for a very low price.

Hope that helps.

Re: A list of free programming books

#63

Post by aviraldg »

justin66 wrote: post #62
aviraldg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which book would you recommend for algorithms and data structures instead?

Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual and Kleinberg and Tardos' Algorithm Design are both very nice books. CLRS is very nice, and depending on your personal ethics the Solutions manual for the 2nd edition is pretty easily obtainable online, which might be useful for that despicable and highly discouraged activity known as self-study. Sedgwick's stuff is not bad. I used Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman's two Algorithms books in c…

So... recommendations for all the major books.

Re: A list of free programming books

#64

Post by [deleted] »

justin66 wrote: post #62
aviraldg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which book would you recommend for algorithms and data structures instead?

Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual and Kleinberg and Tardos' Algorithm Design are both very nice books. CLRS is very nice, and depending on your personal ethics the Solutions manual for the 2nd edition is pretty easily obtainable online, which might be useful for that despicable and highly discouraged activity known as self-study. Sedgwick's stuff is not bad. I used Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman's two Algorithms books in c…

[deleted]

Re: A list of free programming books

#65

Post by justin66 »

aviraldg wrote: post #63
justin66 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual and Kleinberg and Tardos' Algorithm Design are both very nice books. CLRS is very nice, and depending on your personal ethics the Solutions manual for the 2nd edition is pretty easily obtainable online, which might be useful for that despicable and highly discouraged activity known as self-study. Sedgwick's stuff is not bad. I used Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman's two Algorithms books in c…

So... recommendations for all the major books.

I can go into the strengths and weaknesses of each (I'm kind of a packrat...) but you haven't said anything about yourself or what you're looking for. If you really don't know what you're looking for you should just do what the majority of people here would tell you to do and get CLRS. It's not an accident that these are popular textbooks or that CLRS is the most popular.

(I didn't really mean to recommend Sedgwick's stuff. As I said, I just think it's not bad.)

Re: A list of free programming books

#66

Post by auvrw »

kamaal wrote: post #13
staunch wrote: post #12

mjd's Higher Order Perl should be on most people's must-read list: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/

This is one book, you absolutely must read. Even if you don't program in Perl. This is basically the equivalent of SICP for the scripting world.

it's a really good book, no doubt, but comparing it to sicp is a bit much. if you don't program in perl already, it might be more beneficial to just learn haskell, and writing some functional perl could be a first step toward that goal, particularly if you're coming from a background in C. i read some of if while learning perl because i was already somewhat familiar with functional programming.

Re: A list of free programming books

#69

Post by simgidacav »

fest wrote: post #60
simgidacav wrote: post #53

Semi-OT: For e-book reader owners: you can use pandoc to convert from HTML to ePub.

Full-OT: pandoc requires ghc, which takes about 1GiB of disk space, which I found very odd, given that gcc is about 75 MiB.

Yeah, but dude, it's fukken haskell :D. Good comment anyway, I didn't realize the drawback...
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