4 ms·

Show HN: CS textbooks top universities use

7 points by jviotti 8y ago

jviotti 8y ago
A hand curated collection of textbooks used by top universities, sorted by the amount of courses they are referenced on. It started as a personal list to see if there was any patterns on the books best-known CS universities recommended, and it has been very valuable to figure out what book to buy next. Hopefully its useful to others as well! I included some initial universities and ~400 books, and I'm trying to grow this list even more, so please leave a comment if there is any book you know about! (please include the university name and the course if so)
coreyp_1 8y ago
Nice list! Requests/Suggestions: 1. I can only see two books on my screen at any one time. That is A LOT of scrolling just to look through the first page. Can there be a more "condensed" view? 2. Can the classes be grouped/tagged? That way I don't have to scroll through 10 pages just to find out which books are being used for introductory programming courses, or for computer graphics, etc. For that matter, if I am trying to see if there is some hidden gem that someone is using for Linear Algebra, I must scroll through every page, and that is impractical/useless. 3. Are you going to going to make your dataset publically available? At this point we don't even know which universities are involved! But it might make for some interesting analysis if we could see the underlying data.
- jviotti 8y ago
  Thanks a lot for the great feedback! 1. I pushed a quick fix to make it look better on mobile. Thanks for the heads up! 2. Yeah, I see what you mean, and I'm definitely thinking about how to make the website much more browsable than an ordered list. I can see how the website can optimise access to books from a particular subject, and also how to get all the books, across universities, about the overall same subject, even though the latter is trickier as the courses names vary, etc 3. This is actually a great idea. I might put this in a publicly available GitHub repo (both the data and the website), which will also encourage more contributions!
jnordwick 8y ago
Only appears to be Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and Cambridge. Cal getting no love. Also, no authors listed.

7 points by jviotti 8y ago

A hand curated collection of textbooks used by top universities, sorted by the amount of courses they are referenced on. It started as a personal list to see if there was any patterns on the books best-known CS universities recommended, and it has been very valuable to figure out what book to buy next. Hopefully its useful to others as well! I included some initial universities and ~400 books, and I'm trying to grow this list even more, so please leave a comment if there is any book you know about! (please include the university name and the course if so)

coreyp_1 8y ago

Nice list! Requests/Suggestions: 1. I can only see two books on my screen at any one time. That is A LOT of scrolling just to look through the first page. Can there be a more "condensed" view? 2. Can the classes be grouped/tagged? That way I don't have to scroll through 10 pages just to find out which books are being used for introductory programming courses, or for computer graphics, etc. For that matter, if I am trying to see if there is some hidden gem that someone is using for Linear Algebra, I must scroll through every page, and that is impractical/useless. 3. Are you going to going to make your dataset publically available? At this point we don't even know which universities are involved! But it might make for some interesting analysis if we could see the underlying data.

jviotti 8y ago
Thanks a lot for the great feedback! 1. I pushed a quick fix to make it look better on mobile. Thanks for the heads up! 2. Yeah, I see what you mean, and I'm definitely thinking about how to make the website much more browsable than an ordered list. I can see how the website can optimise access to books from a particular subject, and also how to get all the books, across universities, about the overall same subject, even though the latter is trickier as the courses names vary, etc 3. This is actually a great idea. I might put this in a publicly available GitHub repo (both the data and the website), which will also encourage more contributions!

jnordwick 8y ago

Only appears to be Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and Cambridge. Cal getting no love. Also, no authors listed.