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The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

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Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#111

Post by hackermailman »

moron4hire wrote: post #39

I wonder how many people actually read the books they were suggesting. Like here on HN, Art of Computer Programming gets mentioned a lot. But I've not met anyone who has actually read it. And I own a copy. It's so hard of a read that I am just going to assume anyone who says they did is either lying or Donald Knuth. I'm suspect of books as a means of information conveyance. They make great mediums for narratives, but…

I've finished and very much enjoyed the first volume, which is equivalent to the curriculum in any first year compsci course from what I've seen of university lecture schedules (Data Structures such as Lists/Stacks/Queues/Trees/Arrays,GC,'helper functions' and program design,O-notation analysis,testing and debugging w/trace routines, I/O algorithms) but of course in much more detail with much harder problems.

To understand the first few hundred pages on mathematical preliminaries, the books "The Art and Craft of Problem Solving" by Zeitz and "Concepts of Modern Mathematics" by Stewart, were essential, both of which were recommended here in other book list posts. I also had already read the CS:APP book which covers x86-64 assembly so the MIX introduction was fairly straight forward. http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/

A book for me that was hard to read, is this book: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl.html Practical Foundations for Programming Languages each page I have to translate with the notation guide, and is a research exercise searching Wikipedia for additional material.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#112

Post by playing_colours »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #54

Can someone recommend a good book on linear algebra for somebody that took it in college but needs a refresher plus some advanced linear algebra concepts for machine learning?

Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach http://matrixeditions.com/5thUnifiedApproach.html Thick, but after this book you ll be well prepared to ML.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#113

Post by munificent »

hbex5 wrote: post #3

Ah, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, unreadable, hard to maintain Java code than anything else before or since.

> responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, unreadable, hard to maintain Java code

I have the misfortune to remember what some object-oriented codebases looked like before "Design Patterns".

While people—generally those who haven't read the book or completely glossed over the section on the consequences of each pattern—have certainly over-used design patterns, I'll still take that over under-use of them.

An over-engineered too-many-design-patterns codebase is annoying and tedious. A hundred thousand lines of code filled with half-way-reinvented design patterns with its own made up terminology, hard coupling everywhere, piles of global state, and no real architecture to speak of at all is a nightmare.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#114

Post by [deleted] »

curuinor wrote: post #104
JelteF wrote: post #79

Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter. It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to a…

I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file. Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn't like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I've heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.

[deleted]

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#115

Post by randcraw »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #54

Can someone recommend a good book on linear algebra for somebody that took it in college but needs a refresher plus some advanced linear algebra concepts for machine learning?

The texts that I hate least (LA and I have a long and rocky relationship):

- Coding the Matrix, Klein https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Matrix-Algebra-Applications-Co... This has a strong emphasis on LA's utility in CS, and includes concepts outside traditional LA that enrich the narrative.

- Intro to Linear Algebra, Strang https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Linear-Algebra-Gilbert-S... Strang approaches LA from a practical less-theoretical angle, which makes it very sensible if you're an engineer but may not be as suitable if you're a mathematician.

- Linear Algebra, A Modern Intro, Poole https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Introduction-Available... This is a solid text that has worked out most of its bugs over the editions.

- Linear Algebra and its Applications, Lay https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Applications-Updated-C... Like Poole, this is also a solid and long running text.

The books by Klein and Strang also benefit from free videos of those courses that are available from Coursera/BrownU and MIT OCW. Klein's is also available on the Kindle.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#116

Post by hcoyote »

megawatthours wrote: post #78

JS: The Good Parts is obsolete

Similarly, certain books show up multiple times, once for each version. It would be great if those were consolidated to the latest version of the book.

An example of this is when you search for Hadoop. You'll find all 4 editions of Tom White's book show up in the top 10 listing.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#118

Post by hashhar »

40acres wrote: post #48

Not a lot of algorithms books on this list, I was surprised to see CLRS at #14.

SO doesn't focus on CS, they focus on solving problems like "How to get better replication on postgres?" etc. This is also why books like SICP, TAOCP and CLRS seem to be missing.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#119

Post by ci5er »

bluGill wrote: post #80
jasode wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is discussing an effect of the book, not the intent. Do you truly believe that specific DP book caused that effect? I don't. The DP book is extremely dry reading and most programmers have not actually read it. ([In terms of readership/ownership ratio] It's a book like Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" ... everybody knows about it and some might have it on the coffee table but very few actually read it.) I…

Most people have a copy of DP and have not read the whole thing. Most people have read it in that they have read a couple pages, the table of contents, and a couple random patterns. To some extent that is how the book should be read: you have a problem that a DP solves and so you read the section on that pattern to get it right. The problem is most people have a superficial knowledge of the patterns in the book (a li…

> However few people realize that a singleton is a fancy name for a global variable and have all the downsides of a global variable.

Really? It's been twenty years (maybe a bit more?) since I read the book, but I think this was pretty explicit, was it not?

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#120

Post by 40acres »

JelteF wrote: post #79

Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter. It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to a…

I bought this book a few months ago, it's been sitting on my shelf because of its intimidating size (plus the fact that I have a few other books I want to work through) but this review has definitely bumped it up my reading list.
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