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Peter Norvig's Library
- cma 16y agoHuge mass of stuff to sort through; I highly recommend "The Human Use of Human Beings." Anyone have other recommendations from the lists?
- sb 16y agoI can personally recommend "Managing Gigabytes". It is very well written and contains a wealth of very valuable information--definitely worth its price!
- kirubakaran 16y agoI see that it was published in 1999. Is it still relevant today?
- sb 16y agoI think it still is relevant, though the scale has changed by a couple of orders of magnitude. Their showcase system is dated, too. But I think it contains the most important basics for most people who are interested to see how these systems work, in addition to being the only book (at least to my knowledge) that describes how to combine all of the techniques into a search engine.
- JeanPierre 16y agoObviously, this answer depends on what you're interested in. As for myself, I'm quite interested in LISP and making compliators/interpreters for it. Therefore On Lisp and Lisp in Small Pieces are books I'd recommend. (No, I'm not going to tell you that LISP is going to change your life.)
- irahul 16y agoI am confused. Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? I believe he won't mark something as favorite if he hasn't read it. I scrolled about 10 pages trying to see how many books are there and then gave up. How does he find the time to do it? I have read a decent number of books, but compared to his numbers, mine looks like a rounding error. And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense books.
- bombs 16y agoMaybe he's read them all or maybe he's read some. A personal library doesn't mean a collection of books you've read or intend to read; they could simply be points of reference, whether it be the whole book, a chapter, a page or a paragraph.
- tokenadult 16y agoHe's been reading for years; he may very well have read them all. A book I read (much of) in college, Reading for Power and Flexibility, does point out that you don't always have to read a book cover to cover to get a lot of knowledge out of it. Some books I like a lot I start recommending long before I finish reading them, and I don't know whether or not Norvig might have the same approach to reading some books.
- Kaizyn 16y agoUmberto Eco values his library of many thousands for the books in it that he HASN'T read.
- Kaizyn 16y agoIt's also worth pointing out that if you read 3 books a year, you would have read 90 books in a 30 year time span. I would suspect that Norvig reads a good deal more than that and that this selection of books for his book shelf does not represent everything he has read or owns.
- Jun8 16y agoExcellent point! @irahul, I see that you view a library as the storage place for the books that one has read. It should come as a surprise that most researchers/scholars view their private libraries not in this way, they view it as a source of information of mostly unread books. You should definitely read Eco's essay titled 'How to Justify a Private Library' in his collection How to Travel with a Salmon. In it, he discusses his answer to precisely the same question that you have put forth. Here's how he fantasizes answering the question "Oh, what a large number of books you have! Have you read them all?" "In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. ’I haven’t read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?’ But this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up: ’And where do you put them after you’ve read them?’ The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: ’And more, dear sir, many more,’ which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have falled back upon the riposte: ’No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office,’ a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other hand leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure."
- jdrock 16y agoIt's all or mostly technical stuff. I guess he doesn't read Calvin & Hobbes or anything non-work-related?
- wyclif 16y agoIt's a pity that most of these are limited preview. I usually save only "full view" books because that makes my GLibrary more useful to others.
- bl4k 16y agodid anybody else let out a slight giggle when they scrolled down past 'Humor: no books in this bookshelf yet' ?
- bdr 16y agoWe need a partial order on these for which should be read first.
- mmaunder 16y agoIn the first pages of Constraint-based grammar formalisms: © MIT This book was typeset with Donald E. Knuth's TEX and Leslie Lamport's LATEX.
- mahmud 16y agoWhat really stood out for you about a mathematical text being typeset in (La)TeX? Were you also surprised by the popularity of No.2 pencils in elementary schools?
- Matt-Martin 16y agoHow did you search his library on Google Books? Is it possible? How did you find his user id?
- ivenkys 16y agoInspirational stuff.
- adulau 16y agoIt's always very interesting to see the library of other people and especially the one of Peter Norvig... You may find books you don't know or see relationship between topics that you underestimated at some points. Maybe it would be very interesting to see the bookshelves from HN users? I don't know if a lot of HN users have a LibraryThing account but it's a nice way to see what you share (or not share) in your bookshelves with someone else. There are already two groups (moderately active) : http://www.librarything.com/groups/purelyprogrammers http://www.librarything.com/groups/purelyprogrammers http://www.librarything.com/groups/computerscientists http://www.librarything.com/groups/computerscientists An example of statistics or information that you can get out of it: http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau/stats/library http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau/stats/library http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau (on the right side, "Members with your books")
- lylejohnson 16y agoI've used my GoodReads (http://www.goodreads.com/ http://www.goodreads.com/) account in the past for this sort of thing. I didn't realize that there was such a selection of these "share what books you're reading" kinds of sites!
- spacemanaki 16y agoAnd there's even more... My personal favorite is http://readernaut.com/ http://readernaut.com/ just because the design is more modern and simple. Although it has the same problem I had with GoodReads: poor consolidation of editions of the same book, so you end up with so many duplicates. Compared to Wikipedia where there is only one page for "To Kill A Mockingbird" but many on GoodReads and Readernaut.
- waterlesscloud 16y agoWhich of these sites has the best support for data portability?
- lylejohnson 16y ago
- korch 16y agoI had no idea Google even had a page for listing all of your books! Now if only there was a way to seamlessly import that data from Amazon that didn't involve hand coding a screen scraper script...
- wazoox 16y agoLinkedIn has one too... We really need some open platform to manage our identity online!
- jackfoxy 16y agoA lot of books on "agent technology". All I know about this topic is the popular press gave it a lot of attention a few years ago. Anyone care to give a thumbnail sketch on this topic? EDIT: this is the best thumbnail I could quickly find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture
- mark_l_watson 16y agoGood recommendations. I have read about 20 books on his lists and have them in my library. The difference for me is that some of these were very difficult for me to work through! Off topic, but: I am reading "Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce" right now and can strongly recommend it: it characterizes different types of problems that can be solved with map reduce, possible solutions, and tradeoffs for different approaches. Really a useful little book.
- nhnifong 16y agoHas anyone read Norvig's only listed SF book R.U.R?
- newmediaclay 16y agoHad never head of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Looks amazing. Just bought it.
- isnoteasy 16y agoThere should be dense books with very high level in which you are suppose to know the fundamentals and it can explain the core at depth.