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Ask HN: What are the bibles of Computer Science?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the bibles of Computer Science?

#51

Post by deepaksurti »

PAIP: https://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Artificial-Intelligence-Pro...

While it deals with classical AI techniques, it is worth working through this book. Especially the AI example chapters where Norvig teaches how to go from specification to implementation and iterate over the design to fix problems etc. Backed by Common Lisp which allows this quick iteration by getting out of your way, this book is one way to fall in love with programing.

Warning: Once you are done with this book, be prepared to handle the less powerful systems and I am not implying here CL is the most powerful programming environment.

Re: Ask HN: What are the bibles of Computer Science?

#53

Post by CmdrSprinkles »

Might not be full bible level of importance, but if you intend to do any work on Fortran and legacy science codes, "Modern Fortran Explained" by Metcalf, Reid, and Cohen is a must. Better examples and explanations than anything you can find on stack overflow with a focus on f90 (the most commonly accepted flavour) while also discussing the useful parts of 2003.

Re: Ask HN: What are the bibles of Computer Science?

#55

Post by derstander »

A little unorthodox, and not exactly a bible, but I enjoyed Feynman's Lectures on Computation. His CS chops include administering the computation group (of human computers!) during the Manhattan Project and a little work on the Connection Machine (including, apparently, a new method for computing logarithms).

Re: Ask HN: What are the bibles of Computer Science?

#56

Post by mtVessel »

abakker wrote: post #10

The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brooks It is amazing how this book can be interpreted as having predicted the necessity of Agile/DevOps long before the tooling was really available to easily enable that methodology. https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Essays-Software-En...

Brooks' view is much more closely aligned with Boehm's Spiral Model than with Agile. He valued an overarching design that satisfied all stakeholders before construction. He also recommended a top-down approach to iteration, which means prototyping the entire system with each iteration, in successive degrees of refinements. I find that very different than picking features to implement with each sprint. He also found PERT charts to be invaluable, and I can't imagine he would find Kanban boards a sufficient substitute.
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