The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#221

Post by curuinor » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:35 AM UTC

pierrebai wrote: post #164

guelo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursion, self reference, emergent properties are important topics and there are many good resources for studying them, GEB just isn't one of them. Most people that embark on the journey of reading the book fail and are unable to complete it. I believe the author tried to make the book itself some kind of self referential repeating work of art, which might be appealing to some but doesn't end up giving a rigorous tr…

GEB is not a study book. It's written as a multi-layered musing on various inter-connected subjects. It's also not hard to read and entertaining. I get the feeling from the anecdote about the AI professor rejecting students based on having read it and your own reaction that people in the field resent it for not being course material? I also sense a sub-text of resentment about the positions and criticisms of the auth…

It's not so much resentment inasmuch all symbolic AI is evaporating in the shadow of the new new connectionist wave (the "new" connectionist wave being the PDP stuff).

Why not, for example, see it from Hinton's philosophical point of view (besides that the papers are very boring and dry, of course)? He made a very good defense against Pylyshin and Fodor and a few critiques of Hofstadter _and_ the algorithms are shipping on Google Search and things like that.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#222

Post by alexkobold » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:35 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #211

dvt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because GEB is, in many regards, pop-science (or pop-math). It's a fun introductory read, but it won't really (and by really I mean rigorously) explain (and by explain I mean prove) much of anything. Any reference to it in the context of academia is a bit on the nose. It's like trying to study piano and saying you love Mozart. Like, yeah, okay.

What's wrong with Mozart? He is popular for a reason: he is freaking great. I hate that some people smugly dismiss things that are popular as beneath them, or conversely, that you have to like hyper-obscure artist or else you're not into real art. Bullshit, Mozart is great.

Sure, but if the only math you're into is pop math then you're not a mathematician.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#223

Post by agentgt » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:37 AM UTC

I have owned many of those books at various times in my life (either because of school or I borrowed it errr accidentally stole it from work).

The only book I have kept and refuse to part with is the Kernighan + Ritchie book (and I'm not a C programmer).

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#224

Post by p1esk » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 5:08 AM UTC

curuinor wrote: post #221

pierrebai wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GEB is not a study book. It's written as a multi-layered musing on various inter-connected subjects. It's also not hard to read and entertaining. I get the feeling from the anecdote about the AI professor rejecting students based on having read it and your own reaction that people in the field resent it for not being course material? I also sense a sub-text of resentment about the positions and criticisms of the auth…

It's not so much resentment inasmuch all symbolic AI is evaporating in the shadow of the new new connectionist wave (the "new" connectionist wave being the PDP stuff). Why not, for example, see it from Hinton's philosophical point of view (besides that the papers are very boring and dry, of course)? He made a very good defense against Pylyshin and Fodor and a few critiques of Hofstadter _and_ the algorithms are shipp…

Link to the Hinton's view?

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#225

Post by curuinor » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 5:24 AM UTC

p1esk wrote: post #224

curuinor wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much resentment inasmuch all symbolic AI is evaporating in the shadow of the new new connectionist wave (the "new" connectionist wave being the PDP stuff). Why not, for example, see it from Hinton's philosophical point of view (besides that the papers are very boring and dry, of course)? He made a very good defense against Pylyshin and Fodor and a few critiques of Hofstadter _and_ the algorithms are shipp…

Link to the Hinton's view?

There's a lotta good citations in SEP entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#226

Post by xycodex » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 6:13 AM UTC

Why is no one talking about the #1 book on legacy code?

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#227

Post by amai » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 9:02 AM UTC

My own list is better ;-)

https://github.com/asmaier/littlelists/blob/master/books_pro...

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#228

Post by donquichotte » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 9:18 AM UTC

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…

In my opinion, this is one of the most overrated books ever. It's a painfully long, tedious, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing collection of loosely related tales. The idea of self-similarity is somewhat interesting, but certainly not 1500-pages-of-incoherent-ramblings interesting.

I have no idea how this won the Pulitzer prize, probably the judges just could not admit that it was too tedious to finish.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#229

Post by Yizahi » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 9:30 AM UTC

krick wrote: post #199

rhizome wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend calls it "the most popular book that nobody has read," but maybe that was more accurate in the 90s.

I thought the most popular book no-one ever read was Knuth's "The Art of Programming".

And SICP.

Re: The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow

#230

Post by sharmi » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 9:57 AM UTC

For all those people who wonder why is the popular XYZ book not on the list:

The algorithm here is to take the links to amazon and make a count of it. Plain and simple.

For a more popular book like SICP, it just going to mentioned by it's acronym as SICP. The expanded version of the title "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is rarely mentioned and so is the author name. An amazon link would be almost non-existent. This is because, the book is so popular the reader needs no introduction. Unfortunately, as per the logic used for this site, it will not be accounted. The same goes for books whose multiple versions show up in the result.

This is not to put down the dev-books.com site in anyway. To do a disambiguating parser that can parse any format of title and/or author name would increase the complexity and implementation time by orders of magnitude. It would also be completely against the mantra of "Release early and often".