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Books and papers every graduate student should read
- dnautics 13y agoLaTeX is not the lingua franca of Biology/Chemistry. Nonetheless, I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, and spent all of maybe one and a half days getting all of the citations correct, figures on the correct page, etc. Honestly, thanks to LaTeX and a lot of not-stressing-out about things (I wrote it while on vacation in Hawaii), I did my thesis painlessly in about a week, and didn't really understand what the fuss was about. I would add "Death March" by Edward Yourdon, which should be read even if you aren't in the computer industry.
- cmeiklejohn 13y agoI've been putting together a similar list for graduate students of computer science focusing in distributed systems: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings-in-distributed-systems.html http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07... Edited to add HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6036183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6036183
- numbers 13y agoThanks for this list!
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoNo Jefferson's Virtual Time?
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoMight's PL PhD student reading list might scare away many prospectives away from PL research. But no, not all of us do theory and lambda calculus.
- yaddayadda 13y agoI'm a big fan of mattmight, but I have a problem with the very first book on his list. My academic background is the behavioral sciences, and using MLA will get you in deep dog excrement in most behavioral and social sciences. Our goto style guide is the American Psychological Association's Publication Manual - http://apastyle.org/ http://apastyle.org/ APA is predominantly a behavioral and social sciences standard. However, I have a colleague that is currently in a mechanical engineering program and he mentioned just a few days ago that his school has actually gone to exclusively APA for all colleges and departments.
- mattmight 13y agoThanks for the heads up. I'll add a note on this.
- igravious 13y agoIn our humanities grad program we were told to pick either MLA or APA and stick with it. It doesn't matter which, consistency is what matters. Enforcing a particular style across all colleges and departments seems silly. These were the resources we were told to consult: MLA - http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/ http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/ APA - http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ Anyway, you should have a citations database and whatever citation tool you are using (BibTeX for instance) should be able to pull the citation from the database and format it in one of any number of styles.
- obstacle1 13y agoIt's incredibly rare to find advocates for APA in most humanities fields. I've only come across MLA and Chicago. Was yours a terminal program? Mind sharing the discipline? The issue isn't so much enforcing a style across colleges/departments as academic journals.
- igravious 13y agoTerminal program? Don't know what that means, too lazy to Google :) Discipline: digital culture / digital humanities. don't ask! This is in Europe btw, not the US.
- ctdonath 13y agoAlas, The Lambda Calculus is out of print, and comments on the linked Amazon page indicate it's not available even at the $186 (softcover) or $470 (hardcover) prices. ...though the 3 star review is good for a chuckle.
- dill_day 13y agoI guess it must be a joke, but that's a fun review. "I accidently bought this book thinking I was buying a traditional calculus book in order to prepare for a standardized test I had to take. After a few chapters I realized this was no ordinary Calculus book." Anyway, there is a reprint available now for $25 http://www.amazon.com/The-Lambda-Calculus-Syntax-Semantics/dp/184890066X/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Lambda-Calculus-Syntax-Semantics/d...
- waster 13y agoI would argue that every adult should read the resources in the first few categories. Really excellent.
- aet 13y agoI would add "The Elements of Style" by Strunk. I think it is a classic in that area. Edit: Also "On Writing Well" by Zinsser, another classic.
- jseliger 13y agoA writing book is a good idea, but not Strunk and White: http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497 http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549... I prefer "Write Right!", although the most recent edition is needlessly long.
- aet 13y agoInteresting criticism, but not sure I'm convinced.
- igravious 13y agoI have that (Strunk-meister) but never really consult it. Stephen King's (let's put aside what we think of his works for the moment) On Writing is a great style guide even though it concerns writing short stories and novels. Read the technical (non-biographical) part of that book a couple of times and you'll see the words, sentences, and paragraphs that you're cranking out a whole lot differently, I guarantee you. Plus, it's an easy read.
- phaus 13y agoI dislike Stephen King's fiction, but this title is regarded by many as the single greatest book on writing of all time.
- igravious 13y agoIf you are starting off writing, and you're not a freak of nature like David Foster Wallace or James Joyce, and you can get over any revulsions you have about Mr. King, and you'd like to be shown the tools of the craft by a friendly craftsman, for what it is worth I can recommend it. And I want to say thank you (not) to that girl who borrowed my copy and promised to call me and return it and didn't - you suck just a little bit.
- stiff 13y agoI wish people would recognize their own bullshit from time to time and just titled those posts "books I enjoyed", otherwise it turns out more into "every graduate student should read what I had read" or "books I would like people to think I read so I appear smart", e.g. the frequency with which each book appears in lists like this is greatly different from the frequency each book is actually read. On a more technical note, "Compilers" is a great book I enjoyed quite a bit, but it hardly is a great reference for compilers, it isn't even a very good textbook those days, it is very specialized in parsing and lexing and isn't very well balanced, there is much less about backend/runtime/optimization stuff which is the bigger part of compiler-writing those days, and the whole book is far, far removed from practice, it is perfectly possible to read it cover to cover and still have very little idea about how to write an actual compiler. There are much better books those days both if you want to simply write your own compiler (books by Appel, Cooper/Torczon, Grune) or have a reference of the state of the art in compilers (famous book by Muchnick). I would say "Compilers" is more similar to a monograph in specialized topics than to a textbook or reference book.
- yaddayadda 13y agomattmight is a University professor, and presumably advises graduate students in his department. So he's in a slightly different role than your average joe programmer or even rock star computer scientist at the latest startup of Y-combinator fame. In my masters program, there were about 16 books that I saw in every single one of our professors' offices. Over my coursework there, I had to buy about a dozen of them for specific courses. Before graduation I bought the others. While I haven't read every single one of them from cover to cover, I have extensively referenced every one of them. His list should serve the same purpose for the audiences he's identified.
- adamnemecek 13y agoCare to share the list? I think that I can guess what might be on it, but I'm still curious.
- stiff 13y agoEven in this position, or maybe especially in this position, I think it is downright harmful to suggest that there are books every student should read, like there is some canonical set of books that will make a great researcher of you and the world would become a better place if everyone would read the same set. I shared this view for a good while and I deeply regret it, you should instead focus on your problem domain and on problem solving, choose your lectures independently, don't get too bound or too concerned about books in general, and stay deeply critical of anything you read - e.g. you should deliberately look for holes even in the most praised works instead of admiring them blindly. That's the way you can progress and not just keep copying what others have done. And it is very good that not everyone has to and not everyone does read the same books. In the end it is not about the fucking books anyway.
- gtani 13y agoBaez' list for physics/math http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html Great Works in PL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872043
- _random_ 13y agoNo, they aren't.
- cldr 13y agoPretty funny that on the "People also bought..." section in Amazon for the "Even a Geek Can Speak" book is the projector remote the author recommended.
- znowi 13y agoWait, is this baity title the work of the submitter? The actual article is much less sensational: "Reading for graduate students".
- impendia 13y agoTo any grad student about to give his or her first invited lecture, I would recommend McCall Smith's The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs: http://www.amazon.com/The-Finer-Points-Sausage-Dogs/dp/1400095085/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Finer-Points-Sausage-Dogs/dp/14000... In the first chapter, Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, renowed scholar of Portuguese linguistics, travels to America to give a lecture. But due to a mixup, his hosts believed they were inviting an expert on sausage dogs. Too shy to correct them, von Igelfeld makes up his mind to speak about sausage dogs... When I read it I doubled over in laughter. But at the end of the day it reminds you far better than any "serious" book what makes for an effective presentation: humility, confidence, and putting yourself in your audience's head.
- cschmidt 13y agoI did find Knuth's "Mathematical Writing" to be helpful when writing my thesis, and that's on this list. (Even a free .pdf link on that one.)
- dschiptsov 13y agoOne of many benefits of so-called education is in significantly reduced amount time wasted on clueless assumptions and ignorant guesswork. The list makes sense, especially HtDP => ProgLangs => FP + Types "road". btw, there is a wonderful course based on HtDP2 on Coursera by Gregor Kiczales - the guy who wrote AMOP (yeah, almost no one know what is it.) This course is such a rare example of teaching thinking and doing transformation in your mind instead of coding and copypasting that I sometimes watching some lectures for a better night sleep.)) Another nice idea is to google who Matthias Felleisen is and why he is famous guy. Then, perhaps, one could be able to appreciate what academic guys could do.
- graycat 13y agoI have to take some issue with his: > When you're starting out with LaTeX, Leslie Lamport's LaTeX book covers all the basics, and it makes a good reference for all of the common things you'd like to do in LaTeX. > LaTeX, as it turns out, is a deep rabbit hole. (It's Turing-complete.) When you're ready for your black belt in TeX-fu, Donald Knuth's TeXbook is how you get there. > This is not an introductory book. This is for hard-core TeX users. LaTeX is essentially a macro package on top of TeX except TeX and/or it's basic macro package Plain had to be tweaked a little to enable some of the functionality of LaTeX. His description of Knuth's The TeXbook is not correct: The book is nicely "introductory". Also for an introductory book on a technical topic, the quality of the writing of this book is excellent, one of the best, world-class, maybe exemplary. I read the book in late 1994 in about two weeks and have used TeX for all my high quality word whacking since then. I use TeX for all my letters, both business and personal, used TeX for one peer reviewed paper in some applied math for a problem in computer science, and used TeX (to document for myself) the core, original applied math for my startup. I have about 150 macros written in TeX for simple lists, ordered lists, unordered lists, titles, table of contents, cross references, various cases of verbatim (where get to type text that looks like TeX commands but the text gets treated by TeX just as-is or verbatim instead of as TeX commands), some automatic push down stack dynamic storage that conforms to the scope of names rules of the nested block structure, etc. Part of what is good about TeX is the ability to write macros; any TeX user should be able to write a macro of a few lines easily as needed, if only for some one document. TeX, without LaTeX, is fine, perfectly usable. And for a "black belt in TeX-fu" read the five volumes or so of Knuth's detailed documentation of the source code of both TeX and Metafont. LaTeX is now quite an advanced macro package, far beyond my 150 macros or what a user should try to write for themselves. But, the manuals that describe LaTeX well are much thicker than Knuth's The TeXbook and, in my opinion, less well written. Mostly people who want to do high quality word whacking, especially with some mathematical material, with TeX or LaTeX likely should just start with LaTeX and there maybe the book the OP recommends, Leslie Lamport's book.