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Most old books are effectively disposable decor - the industry prints them by the millions and many have a limited life akin to the Dreamweaver how-to's. The "l

Most old books are effectively disposable decor - the industry prints them by the millions and many have a limited life akin to the Dreamweaver how-to's. The "last a lifetime" highly sought-after books are truly the exception here. For archival purposes you can go see if it's in the Library of Congress or scanned into Internet Archive, and if not, that's a project you can opt to take on(but it's pretty high effort). Quickly checking for resale value as other comments suggest is also not hard, just expect that most of your stash will go straight to the bin, and getting more out of it means making it your job.

mike_paranoid 4y ago
What are some examples of comp Sci/programming "last a lifetime" books? I am just a little confused about this statement.
- grzm 4y ago
  From the hip: Knuth, Brooks, Gray, Sussman. General theory type stuff rather than specific technologies. Stuff on how to think about problems rather than specific solutions.
- gshubert17 4y ago
  Oldcomputerbooks.com focuses on computer material from the 1940s through about 1975. Some years back they bought my volumes of Knuth's TAOCP and one book by Edsger Dijkstra, _The Discipline of Programming_, but not anything more recent. These may not "last a lifetime" in some sense. But early computing books, especially by well-known authors, may come close.
- richardjam73 4y ago
  I have a more recent one from 1990. "Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages" by Bertrand Meyer. It is math heavy.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  IMO, the following would be in that category: Algorithms, unix networking, assembly books, the art of computer programming, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, anything by Benjamin Pierce, good compiler books, discrete mathematics, the art of electronics, Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Spivak's Calculus, ...
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Theory of Computation
spacedcowboy 4y ago
About 30-some years ago, I bought a book entitled "The Unix Programming Environment". I was just going to college, and the machines were all unix-based. I figured it was worth some of my student grant to figure out how to use them.. A few months ago, I picked up my significantly dog-eared copy of TUPE and leafed through it to a section I'd remembered being about 'hoc', the higher-order calculator language they derive from first principles. I'm currently writing a 6502 compiler and I was implementing the assembler stage. I wanted my assembler to have macros and be able to calculate expressions etc., because I'm planning on having an asm [...] block in the high-level code. Being able to call the macro "_xfer32 r1,r2" is a lot more appealing than a long series of lda/sta... So I sat and read about hoc, and worked my way through it, eventually coming up with something I could put into my code and call for any expression calculation. The compiler is a full-blown AST-based model but assemblers are much simpler beasts, and accepting of more limitations. Hoc (or rather an adaption of it) was an ideal basis for what I wanted. Some old books have timeless wisdom within.

mike_paranoid 4y ago

What are some examples of comp Sci/programming "last a lifetime" books? I am just a little confused about this statement.

grzm 4y ago
From the hip: Knuth, Brooks, Gray, Sussman. General theory type stuff rather than specific technologies. Stuff on how to think about problems rather than specific solutions.
gshubert17 4y ago
Oldcomputerbooks.com focuses on computer material from the 1940s through about 1975. Some years back they bought my volumes of Knuth's TAOCP and one book by Edsger Dijkstra, _The Discipline of Programming_, but not anything more recent. These may not "last a lifetime" in some sense. But early computing books, especially by well-known authors, may come close.
richardjam73 4y ago
I have a more recent one from 1990. "Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages" by Bertrand Meyer. It is math heavy.
mejutoco 4y ago
IMO, the following would be in that category: Algorithms, unix networking, assembly books, the art of computer programming, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, anything by Benjamin Pierce, good compiler books, discrete mathematics, the art of electronics, Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Spivak's Calculus, ...
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Theory of Computation

spacedcowboy 4y ago

About 30-some years ago, I bought a book entitled "The Unix Programming Environment". I was just going to college, and the machines were all unix-based. I figured it was worth some of my student grant to figure out how to use them.. A few months ago, I picked up my significantly dog-eared copy of TUPE and leafed through it to a section I'd remembered being about 'hoc', the higher-order calculator language they derive from first principles. I'm currently writing a 6502 compiler and I was implementing the assembler stage. I wanted my assembler to have macros and be able to calculate expressions etc., because I'm planning on having an asm [...] block in the high-level code. Being able to call the macro "_xfer32 r1,r2" is a lot more appealing than a long series of lda/sta... So I sat and read about hoc, and worked my way through it, eventually coming up with something I could put into my code and call for any expression calculation. The compiler is a full-blown AST-based model but assemblers are much simpler beasts, and accepting of more limitations. Hoc (or rather an adaption of it) was an ideal basis for what I wanted. Some old books have timeless wisdom within.