

Ask HN: Great programming books you read in 2009? - programmer7

Give me list of top 3 programming books you read in 2009
======
hga
_Programming Language Pragmatics_ by Michael L. Scott: The explanations of
many things I'd read in other sources are no less than fantastic, I now
_understand_ a bunch of things I had only superficially "got" previously.
[http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-
Third-...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-
Michael/dp/0123745144/), check out the overview and reviews.

 _Coders at Work_ by Peter Seibel: By far the best of this type of book (well,
not counting the '80s classic _Programmers at Work_ which I haven't read since
then), one of the best Lisp authors interviews in depth a lot of really
interesting and/or important people, from James Zawinski to Donald Knuth, with
Javascript, static FP and PARC people, Guy Steele, Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson,
Fran Allen ( _really_ important interview which points out how C/C++ to the
exclusion of truly high level languages have been a disaster when used beyond
their proper niches), etc. All are masters who've gotten their hands dirty,
many are theory people as well. [http://www.amazon.com/Coders-at-Work-Peter-
Seibel/dp/1430219...](http://www.amazon.com/Coders-at-Work-Peter-
Seibel/dp/1430219483/)

 _Garbage Collection_ by Jones Lins: Pretty much the only book in the field
(except for the forthcoming _Advanced Garbage Collection_ sequel in the middle
of this year), covers the territory as of the mid-90s. Much more fun than
trying to track down 100 individual papers and trying to make sense of it all.
Exposition is clear and you get a real feeling for the subtleties of the field
(especially when you try fun things like generational and/or concurrent GC).
[http://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Algorithms-
Automati...](http://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Algorithms-Automatic-
Management/dp/0471941484/)

------
gtani
by categories:(definition of "read, past tense": spent at least 45 minutes in
Borders flipping thru)

\-----------------------

FP:

\-- Cesarini/Thompson, Erlang ; Logan, Merritt, Carlsson, OTP in action

\-- Halloway, Clojure (supposedly, besides the Manning MEAP PDF book, another
Manning and a Apress book are in preparation)

\-- Scala: (all 3 books look pretty good, tho I haven't spent a lot of time
digging in, and haven't decided if scala's language syntax is denser than
clojure's; Payne/Wampler text freely available online

\-- haskell: Real World. content freely available online.

\----------------------------

NoSQL, kvstore, docstore, mapreduce:

\-- Hadoop: Oreilly (White) and Apress (Venner) look good at first glance

\-- couchdb: freely avail draft by Anderson, Slater Lehnardt

\---------------------------------

Messaging queues and brokers: AMQP, rabbit, XMPP, ejabberd:

\- no books / drafts, PDF beta books I'm aware of

~~~
gtani
some metadata: the 3 freely available texts above, and the cheap MEAP/ beta
book prepub drafts from Manning, Oreilly and Pragmatic are definitely good
things (tho the Manning drafts are really rough).

