Programming books you might want to consider reading

So pretty much every book from the CS course.

I do, but with a kid my time is now limited. Unused knowledge has this habit of being forgotten. It turns out to be a terrible waste, at least from my POV.

It probably isn't if you're coming at the material for the first time, or after a long break. I took a 15-week course in Linear Algebra a few months ago, and we only covered about half the book in that time. I spent just about every weekend and evening doing those exercises. It's very time consuming.

However, if you gave me my old College Algebra book, I might be able to skim through it in a month of weekends and refresh myself on most of it, because I've used that stuff a lot in various jobs. Same goes for a lot of (but by no means all) programming books. I'm immersed in that stuff daily, so I can get through it pretty quickly.

>Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses.

And swinging a bat is one of the skills baseball players need to use for their job. The comment you replied to was talking about skills that are not going to be used every day. So I don't think your analogy is very useful.

Luu says regarding the Little Book of Semaphores:

"If I’m writing grungy low-level threading code today, I’m overwhelmingly like to be using c++11 threading primitives, so I’d like something that uses those instead of semaphores,"

But as someone whose lowest-level experience of concurrency is with APIs similar to the C++ primitives (which are not that different from pthreads), I disagree. I found it a real eye-opener to see how all this can be broken down to semaphores.

I am starting to think that a semaphore-only set of primtives would be easier to reason about. I've seen better coders than me make over-complicated mutex based solutions when sempahores gave a simple answer. And I bet I've done it too.