7 ms·
On the shoulders of the giants
- mathattack 7y agoAwesome list. Thank you for sharing!
- x10an14 7y agoI agree! I've only read one of the books on the list (Accelerate), and it was such a delight to have claims referencing sources in publically available empirical data/studies to corroborate said claims! Not to mention that their observations and inferences (based on the empirical data) make a lot of sense when you ponder a little while! (As opposed to the many "this-is-how-we-feel-the-truth-should-be-represented-after-our-experiences" presently available in countless blog posts and conference videos on the same subjects/themes as the Accelerate book touches upon).
- omegaham 7y ago"In computing, we mostly stand on each other's feet." -Richard Hamming
- neilv 7y ago"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my toes."
- kubanczyk 7y ago"my shoulders" actually. From Hal Abelson, who attributes this thought to his Princeton roommate Jeff Goll
- Frost1x 7y agoThis reminds me of a Neil deGrasse Tyson quote to the effect of: "Walk into a bookstore and look at the number of books on a topic. The more books on a topic you see, the less we understand about the topic." There's a lot of clashing perspectives on computing and modern software architectures so I'd say Hamming is on the dot.
- stainforth 7y agoHamming is the compression guy right? I feel theres some extra connection seen here in being able to compress down the redundant info in that section of the bookstore
- eevilspock 7y agoDon't most SV types believe they've picked themselves up by their own bootstrapped?
- dang 7y agoIs there any reason to believe Hamming said this? https://wiki.c2.com/?ShouldersOfGiants https://wiki.c2.com/?ShouldersOfGiants kind of implies no. As far as standing-on-giants jokes go, when Stekel defended himself to Freud with "a dwarf standing on a giant sees a little further", Freud replied "a louse on an astronomer does not". https://books.google.com/books?id=wmB9AAAAMAAJ&q=louse+intitle:freud+inauthor:jones&dq=louse+intitle:freud+inauthor:jones&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7vOz4nYroAhVuFjQIHXsUAVgQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg https://books.google.com/books?id=wmB9AAAAMAAJ&q=louse+intit...
- teddyh 7y agoNo TAOCP or even The Mythical Man-Month?
- microtherion 7y agoTAOCP is a wonderful coffee table book, but I don't think I've ever seen somebody use it on a day to day basis.
- mangamadaiyan 7y agoIt isn't really the kind of book you use on a day-to-day basis; you consume it in small doses (after crossing the initial cliff of notation, et cetera), like vitamin supplements. That doesn't make it any less useful, however.
- dfox 7y agoToday having physical copy of TAOCP is mostly only useful as the coffee table/conference room artifact. All the stuff in there is either well known because it is part of basic CS curriculum, better analyzed by subsequent works or mostly irrelevant.
- klodolph 7y agoMy personal experience is that anything in TAOCP can be found elsewhere in a more accessible format.
- svat 7y agoThat's interesting; my personal experience is the opposite: for most things in TAOCP, it is written more clearly than its source material, especially as it gets to the more advanced topics within each section (often only published in papers, not yet in books). For example, Section 7.1.4 on Binary Decision Diagrams, aka BDDs and ZDDs (pages 202–280 of Volume 4A, draft online: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc1b.pdf http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc1b.pdf) is not something I've seen explained to that level of clarity and detail anywhere else. Plus there are a lot of Knuth's original ideas in the books; his innovation is not restricted to summarizing and teaching.
- llimllib 7y agoIn the vein of working effectively with legacy code, "Reading Code" by Spinelli taught me a lot when I was a younger engineer https://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-Perspective/dp/0201799405 https://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-Perspective/... (Amazon says I bought it 14 years ago!)
- fossuser 7y agoI’ll second designing data intensive applications as one of the most interesting, readable, and relevant technical books I’ve ever read. Working Effectively with Legacy Code was also impressive, I think I just read it too early before I was good enough to really understand and use it. TDD is also worth reading (and it’s short) to get a sense of tests if like me, it’s something you’d never really done before when learning. If you like soul of a new machine, you’d probably like Halt and Catch Fire on Netflix. I’d also recommend the Phoenix project and the dev ops handbook. Code by Charles Petzold is one of my favorites to recommend, something every CS student should read. I’ll have to check out the others on this list too.
- befictious 7y agoHalt and Catch Fire is SO underated! It's fun. I try and describe it as if the team that made Mad Men created Silicon Valley. It's fun, nostalgic, and shows a fairly accurate few of the devil-may-care and slightly-charlatan approach to early (and some current) startups.
- Taniwha 7y agoSigh, moving house soon, the kids are gone so it's smaller, we're not going to have a dedicated library, choosing which textbooks to keep and which to toss today has been brutal ... half haven't aged well and are going
- microtherion 7y ago15 years ago, one of the "soft questions" I liked to ask in phone interviews was "If I were to look at your bookshelf right now, what books would I see there?" Nowadays, I keep nearly all my books electronically; I still have a sizable bookshelf, but the books are gathering dust.
- bcrosby95 7y agoI don't like electronic technical books. I find it too hard to find what I'm looking for in them. I find it's hard to beat being able to quickly flip through a physical book.
- pottertheotter 7y agoI even like to print out a lot of technical documentation. For instance, I’ve printed the Tutorial from the Python documentation, as well as the regular expressions module. It was really handy to be able to look through it wherever I wanted, mark it up, and reference it easily. One of my biggest gripes is when documentation does not have a PDF.
- mhh__ 7y agoOn the one hand, I prefer the feel of a physical book but I find myself reading them less because I can't read them quite as easily for fun (i.e. trying reading Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler while lying down without breaking your nose or arms)
- saagarjha 7y agoOn the other hand, I enjoy having electronic versions of technical books because I can search for things in them.
- _frkl 7y agoYes, plus you often get updates nowadays, which, depending on the domain of the book, can be pretty important.
- Hendrikto 7y ago
- redact207 7y agoThe DDD books are such a godsend when approaching complex business domains and how to build software for them. I wish they taught that stuff back at college rather than all the curriculum stuffers.
- swah 7y agoIt was so alien when I was not in this kind of business though, that I thought it was a bunch of completely outdated ideas from the 90s.
- lngnmn1 7y agoOh god, bunch of bullshit books. The list of giants should begin with HtDP, Programming Erlang and everything bu Joe Armstrong, Intro to FP by Bird and Wadler, Types book by Pierce, PAIP, OnLisp by pg, Scala books by Odersky, also Jackson, Dijkstra, Wirth, everything by Hudak, SPJ, David Turner (Miranda) etc, etc. Jokes aside, HtDP and Erlang books, being exceptionally good, had DSLs (Domain-driven design), TTD and refactoring memes implicitly, as something natural and obvious.
- gfodor 7y agoThe greatest technical book I’ve ever read is PBRT. It’s a computer graphics book, but is a phenomenal achievement.