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Ask HN: What fiction/non-fiction book should everyone read on the topic of CS?
This should be interpreted in the broadest sense to include books like both American Kingpin and Practical Vim as examples.
- JojoFatsani 2y agoThe Phoenix Project.
- xvash 2y agoCame here to recommend this. Also the book, "The Unicorn Project" is the SW Dev side of the Phoenix Project.
- a_tartaruga 2y agoMANIAC & Turing's Cathedral
- ggm 2y agoWhere Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, (Katie Hafner, 1998)
- asaiacai 2y agoJohn Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" I liked. It was supposed to be assigned reading for Berkeley's data structures class CS61B, and I don't think I really internalized the lessons within, but after re-reading it recently, I appreciated it a lot more and found the material transcends how to write code but also how to architect things as well.
- ggm 2y agoSoul of a New Machine (Tracy Kidder, 1981) the experience building the DG 32 bit mini.
- ggm 2y agoGödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter, 1979)
- ggm 2y agoThe Dragon Book: Principles of Compiler Design (Alfred V. Aho, and Jeffrey D. Ullman, 1986)
- ggm 2y agoA Quarter Century of UNIX, (Peter Salus, 1994)
- ggm 2y agoThe Cuckoo's Egg (Clifford Stoll, 1989)
- mooreds 2y agoCame here to say this.
- brudgers 2y agoTAoCP is worth trying to read.
- dinesh213 2y ago[dead]
- f30e3dfed1c9 2y agoDon't know who you mean by "everyone," but the only two mentioned so far suitable for a broad audience are The Soul of a New Machine and The Cuckoo's Nest.
- cpach 2y agoWhat the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry / John Markoff
- jjice 2y agoUNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan. Brian wrote The C Programming Language (the book), along with many other great books. He worked at Bell Labs during the time of Unix and it's a casual, whimsical telling of some of the history there.
- LostMyLogin 2y agoThis looks outstanding. Thanks for the sharing!
- vintageclothldn 2y agoPersonally really enjoyed Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
- mooreds 2y ago"Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation" by Joseph Weizenbaum
- markus_zhang 2y agoSoul of a New Machine Showstopper Books that pull me from the darker mood from time to time.
- dharris 2y ago"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season." from _Soul of a New Machine_ I was a teen when I read this. I should re-read
- muzani 2y agoZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a HN favorite, but seems to have dropped off the charts. It's not exactly CS, but covers the topic of tech and quality.
- nicbou 2y agoI really didn't like that book. Shop Class As Soulcraft is a far more lucid treatment of the topic in my opinion.
- lawrenceyan 2y agoI Am a Strange Loop (Douglas Hofstadter, 2007) > In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. — Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoNaming only ones I haven't seen mentioned in other comments: - Networking for Systems Administrators, by Michael W. Lucas. Its explicit goal is to teach you just enough about networking, from the electron up, that you can talk to an actual network engineer and not make a fool out of yourself. It's a phenomenally high-ROI read if networking isn't your strong suit. - The first 3 chapters of Mastering Regular Expressions. Regexes are up there with Vim keybindings in terms of sheer ubiquitous use no matter what stack you find yourself in. The rest of the book is excellent if you want to actually implement a regex engine. - The Art of Unix Programming. Less technical. Gives you an idea of why exactly 'nix machines are like that, especially older commands. The 18 rules of design are worth committing to memory. - The Linux Programming Interface. More technical. Pairs esp nicely with the above. Lots of practice C code one can run, plenty of short self-contained chapters. - Not a book, but an online paper: https://how.complexsystems.fail https://how.complexsystems.fail . I see echoes of this everywhere I work, and it often helps me understand what kinds of "bad" things are secretly highly evolved resiliency measures. - The Little Schemer. Just for the joy of solving problems. Most of the others I can think of are too specialized to be of worth to everyone, but for what it's worth, William S. Vincent's Django for Beginners, APIs, and Professionals are a lovely triptych for anyone wanting to get into backend web dev.
- eftepede 2y agoWhen Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
- epirogov 2y agoDan Brown Digital Fortress noivel about cryptoanalysis
- xeonmc 2y agoThe Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
- mindcrash 2y agoCode: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold https://codehiddenlanguage.com/ https://codehiddenlanguage.com/ Algorithms to Live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks
- mikeckennedy 2y agoI loved the Zero Day: A Jeff Aiken Novel series by Mark Russinovich (CTO of Azure). It's a proper tech / developer thriller that uses plausible ideas. There are three books in the series I think.