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Programming books you might want to consider reading

danluu.com

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Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#91

Post by prefect42 »

dancek wrote: post #70
sbov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm currently a stay-at-home twin dad, and I absolutely crave to learn something new in my spare time (which varies from none to even two hours a day if I'm lucky). I don't care if I forget, but for me life just becomes too stressful without constant learning. Of course, if I was working, I'd probably have enough to learn at work.

Here here, constant learning is the only thing to save our sanity.

Regarding work, I do have a fulltime job, yet one has to fight hard to ensure any amount of learning, constant or otherwise.

Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#92

Post by cscheid »

The best introduction to optimization methods book I've ever read is "Optimization by Vector Space Methods" by Luenberger. This is the book that opened my eyes to the generality of least-squares methods, the actual geometry of the problem, and how to apply it extremely generally. I read this before Boyd and Vanderberghe's "Convex Optimization", and I'm glad I did - it goes much more deeply into the intuition and exposition. It's not as well known as it should be, but it's a complete gem.

Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#93

Post by jrapdx3 »

hollander wrote: post #82
jcoffland wrote: post #48

The best Calculus book I've ever found is free from MIT. https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-001-calculus-online-tex...

This may be the best book and it's great that you can download it for free, but it's scanned, and that makes it horrible to read. Still I marked it in my book list under math, and hope I'll find the time to read it in the future. I will buy a decent EPUB or PDF then. I don't mind to pay for that convenience.

Your comment prompted me to look at the contents of the online PDFs. They are scanned-in documents, but I didn't find the text too hard to read. To my surprise there were active links to sections of the book from the TOC. Certainly for the free price it's a generous thing to offer.

Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#95

Post by ktRolster »

cgag wrote: post #61
Zombieball wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good video from Niel deGrasse Tyson talking about learning. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=utedyJ7QRBs His argument is learning is never a waste of time, even if you don't ever use and forget everything you studied. The simple act of learning is beneficial, it helps build connections in your brain. You develop skills that can be applied to other problems.

It's always beneficial but is it always more beneficial than going to the gym, being with your kids/SO, sleeping more, etc? Everything has a cost. I'm very heavy on learning for learnings sake but I don't like the way it's framed as the correct thing to do.

Learn with your kinds/SO. Let's be honest, a lot of your time with them is spent watching TV or something like that anyway. Turn it off and read together.

Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#96

Post by ktRolster »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #40

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-opene…

When you use pthread semaphores, be careful reading the documentation, because there are some gotchas that are not immediately obvious. I think that's why more programmers don't use them, because at first they seem intimidating.

Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#98

Post by jimmaswell »

smnplk wrote: post #80
cruise02 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ref…

Well, math really isn't a spectator sport. You have to do the work on your own, reading is only part of the work. A very time consuming hobby indeed.

It depends. I tend to remember a fair amount of material in math classes from just paying attention. I rarely explicitly study at all for math classes and when I do the results are mixed. Example: In calculus 2 there were all those annoying weird trig integral forms. I couldn't remember them all because it was like a new one arrived daily for a while. I set out to do practice problems with them but still didn't remember much and did poorly on parts of tests that required them. Other things like arc length, double integrals, integration by parts or integrating vertically instead of horizontally, all were just intuitive to me and I remembered them without trying to. I'm not sure how typical or not my results are but in general throughout school if I felt the need to study something and practice it, it was bad news, but if something made sense to me it stuck without much further effort.

Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#99

Post by unethical_ban »

lisper wrote: post #45

One of my favorites not on the list: Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by Charles Petzold https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JDMPOK2/ Takes you from simple mechanical switches all the way to a CPU.

You're dead, marincounty. I've never seen it before, where someone's comments can be dead sometimes and available others.

Re: Programming books you might want to consider reading

#100

Post by sdrothrock »

hal9000xp wrote: post #31

Upvoted for recommendation of "Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani; Algorithms". Unlike TAOCP and CLRS it's actually readable in realistic amount of time. This book is also very good at explaining theoretical computer science. In particular - NP completeness. Official copy is available at home page of Umesh Vazirani at berkeley.edu: 0: Prologue - https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms/chap0.... 1: Al…

I saw that he mentioned that he got the book off of an author's website for free and went looking for it -- found Dr. Vazirani's site and course page[0]. He mentions that it's available for download because at the time of writing, it wasn't found in bookstores.

Berkeley, in the meantime, has deliberately blocked access to the linked algorithms.html[1], as well as the root directory of the algorithm PDF files, suggesting to me that this is not an actual "free" book.

If anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to hear about it since I love free books.

[0] http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs170/fa06/

[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html

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