
Peter Norvig's Library - fogus
http://books.google.com/books?uid=8640673873589796416
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bl4k
did anybody else let out a slight giggle when they scrolled down past 'Humor:
no books in this bookshelf yet' ?

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cma
Huge mass of stuff to sort through; I highly recommend "The Human Use of Human
Beings." Anyone have other recommendations from the lists?

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sb
I can personally recommend "Managing Gigabytes". It is very well written and
contains a wealth of very valuable information--definitely worth its price!

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kirubakaran
I see that it was published in 1999. Is it still relevant today?

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sb
I think it still is relevant, though the scale has changed by a couple of
orders of magnitude. Their showcase system is dated, too. But I think it
contains the most important basics for most people who are interested to see
how these systems work, in addition to being the only book (at least to my
knowledge) that describes how to combine all of the techniques into a search
engine.

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bdr
We need a partial order on these for which should be read first.

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mark_l_watson
Good recommendations. I have read about 20 books on his lists and have them in
my library. The difference for me is that some of these were very difficult
for me to work through!

Off topic, but: I am reading "Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce"
right now and can strongly recommend it: it characterizes different types of
problems that can be solved with map reduce, possible solutions, and tradeoffs
for different approaches. Really a useful little book.

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adulau
It's always very interesting to see the library of other people and especially
the one of Peter Norvig... You may find books you don't know or see
relationship between topics that you underestimated at some points.

Maybe it would be very interesting to see the bookshelves from HN users? I
don't know if a lot of HN users have a LibraryThing account but it's a nice
way to see what you share (or not share) in your bookshelves with someone
else.

There are already two groups (moderately active) :

<http://www.librarything.com/groups/purelyprogrammers>
<http://www.librarything.com/groups/computerscientists>

An example of statistics or information that you can get out of it:

<http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau/stats/library>
<http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau> (on the right side, "Members with
your books")

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lylejohnson
I've used my GoodReads (<http://www.goodreads.com/>) account in the past for
this sort of thing. I didn't realize that there was such a selection of these
"share what books you're reading" kinds of sites!

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waterlesscloud
Which of these sites has the best support for data portability?

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lylejohnson
GoodReads has a pretty thorough-looking API (<http://www.goodreads.com/api>).
Don't know if anyone has yet written a tool to just dump your entire account's
contents to an XML file, but that seems like something that a motivated person
could do. ;)

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wyclif
It's a pity that most of these are limited preview. I usually save only "full
view" books because that makes my GLibrary more useful to others.

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jdrock
It's all or mostly technical stuff. I guess he doesn't read Calvin & Hobbes or
anything non-work-related?

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jackfoxy
A lot of books on "agent technology". All I know about this topic is the
popular press gave it a lot of attention a few years ago. Anyone care to give
a thumbnail sketch on this topic?

EDIT: this is the best thumbnail I could quickly find
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture>

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Matt-Martin
How did you search his library on Google Books? Is it possible? How did you
find his user id?

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irahul
I am confused. Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? I believe he
won't mark something as favorite if he hasn't read it. I scrolled about 10
pages trying to see how many books are there and then gave up.

How does he find the time to do it? I have read a decent number of books, but
compared to his numbers, mine looks like a rounding error.

And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense
books.

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plinkplonk
"Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? "

Why is this so surprising? I know many people who've read many thousands of
books. I've read thousands of books cover to cover, I have about a thousand
books in my library at home (about 300 ish technical books - I gave away
another 300 or so) and I am still in my thirties (Fwiw I started reading by
myself when I was 3. I buy a book every two weeks or so these days).

Even if you restrict the scope to technical books(assuming they have to be
read relatively slowly) reading and completely understanding the content of a
few hundred technical books is _well_ within the scope of a human lifetime. It
isn't even that hard if you work steadily in a disciplined fashion.

"And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense
books."

"Density" is a function of what kind of background you already have. Dr.Norvig
has a degree in Applied Math (Erdos number 4 I believe) and a PhD in Computer
Science. I am sure he can read a "dense" tract faster than most people could.
Also, most of those books (I own some of them) are textbooks. They aren't
really all that "dense" (compared to a PhD thesis in Pure Mathematics, say).
Most advanced material in CS/AI is in conference papers and rarely, if ever,
make their way into textbooks till years after publication. I bet Peter Norvig
reads a thousand or so papers every year. Every CS researcher I know does.

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swah
Do you allocate some fixed time or number of pages as a goal to read every day
?

When I start programming it takes up all available time..

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jshen
I've started allocating a fixed amount of time for learning everyone week.
This mostly consists of working my way through books like these and writing
some small scripts that utilizes the material on some data I have.

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newmediaclay
Had never head of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Looks
amazing. Just bought it.

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nhnifong
Has anyone read Norvig's only listed SF book R.U.R?

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dkarl
It's a boring and poorly written play, of historical interest only.

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mmaunder
In the first pages of Constraint-based grammar formalisms:

© MIT This book was typeset with Donald E. Knuth's TEX and Leslie Lamport's
LATEX.

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mahmud
What really stood out for you about a mathematical text being typeset in
(La)TeX? Were you also surprised by the popularity of No.2 pencils in
elementary schools?

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ivenkys
Inspirational stuff.

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korch
I had no idea Google even had a page for listing all of your books! Now if
only there was a way to seamlessly import that data from Amazon that didn't
involve hand coding a screen scraper script...

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wazoox
LinkedIn has one too... We really need some open platform to manage our
identity online!

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isnoteasy
There should be dense books with very high level in which you are suppose to
know the fundamentals and it can explain the core at depth.

