
On the shoulders of the giants - LukeMathWalker
https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2020-03-08-on-the-shoulders-of-the-giants/
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fossuser
I’ll second designing data intensive applications as one of the most
interesting, readable, and relevant technical books I’ve ever read.

Working Effectively with Legacy Code was also impressive, I think I just read
it too early before I was good enough to really understand and use it.

TDD is also worth reading (and it’s short) to get a sense of tests if like me,
it’s something you’d never really done before when learning.

If you like soul of a new machine, you’d probably like Halt and Catch Fire on
Netflix. I’d also recommend the Phoenix project and the dev ops handbook.

Code by Charles Petzold is one of my favorites to recommend, something every
CS student should read.

I’ll have to check out the others on this list too.

~~~
befictious
Halt and Catch Fire is SO underated! It's fun. I try and describe it as if the
team that made Mad Men created Silicon Valley.

It's fun, nostalgic, and shows a fairly accurate few of the devil-may-care and
slightly-charlatan approach to early (and some current) startups.

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Taniwha
Sigh, moving house soon, the kids are gone so it's smaller, we're not going to
have a dedicated library, choosing which textbooks to keep and which to toss
today has been brutal ... half haven't aged well and are going

~~~
edraferi
Culling collections intelligently promotes an archive to a library.

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llimllib
In the vein of working effectively with legacy code, "Reading Code" by
Spinelli taught me a lot when I was a younger engineer
[https://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-
Perspective/...](https://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-
Perspective/dp/0201799405)

(Amazon says I bought it 14 years ago!)

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microtherion
15 years ago, one of the "soft questions" I liked to ask in phone interviews
was "If I were to look at your bookshelf right now, what books would I see
there?"

Nowadays, I keep nearly all my books electronically; I still have a sizable
bookshelf, but the books are gathering dust.

~~~
bcrosby95
I don't like electronic technical books. I find it too hard to find what I'm
looking for in them. I find it's hard to beat being able to quickly flip
through a physical book.

~~~
saagarjha
On the other hand, I enjoy having electronic versions of technical books
because I can search for things in them.

~~~
_frkl
Yes, plus you often get updates nowadays, which, depending on the domain of
the book, can be pretty important.

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redact207
The DDD books are such a godsend when approaching complex business domains and
how to build software for them. I wish they taught that stuff back at college
rather than all the curriculum stuffers.

~~~
swah
It was so alien when I was not in this kind of business though, that I thought
it was a bunch of completely outdated ideas from the 90s.

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gfodor
The greatest technical book I’ve ever read is PBRT. It’s a computer graphics
book, but is a phenomenal achievement.

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mathattack
Awesome list. Thank you for sharing!

~~~
x10an14
I agree!

I've only read one of the books on the list (Accelerate), and it was such a
delight to have claims referencing sources in publically available empirical
data/studies to corroborate said claims! Not to mention that their
observations and inferences (based on the empirical data) make a lot of sense
when you ponder a little while!

(As opposed to the many "this-is-how-we-feel-the-truth-should-be-represented-
after-our-experiences" presently available in countless blog posts and
conference videos on the same subjects/themes as the Accelerate book touches
upon).

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teddyh
No TAOCP or even _The Mythical Man-Month_?

~~~
microtherion
TAOCP is a wonderful coffee table book, but I don't think I've ever seen
somebody use it on a day to day basis.

~~~
mangamadaiyan
It isn't really the kind of book you use on a day-to-day basis; you consume it
in small doses (after crossing the initial cliff of notation, et cetera), like
vitamin supplements. That doesn't make it any less useful, however.

~~~
klodolph
My personal experience is that anything in TAOCP can be found elsewhere in a
more accessible format.

~~~
svat
That's interesting; my personal experience is the opposite: for most things in
TAOCP, it is written more clearly than its source material, especially as it
gets to the more advanced topics within each section (often only published in
papers, not yet in books). For example, Section 7.1.4 on Binary Decision
Diagrams, aka BDDs and ZDDs (pages 202–280 of Volume 4A, draft online:
[http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc1b.pdf](http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc1b.pdf))
is not something I've seen explained to that level of clarity and detail
anywhere else. Plus there are a lot of Knuth's original ideas in the books;
his innovation is not restricted to summarizing and teaching.

~~~
frans
TAOCP = The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

~~~
svat
Sorry, I don't understand: could you clarify why you're telling me this? Was
there anything in my comment that seemed like it was talking about something
else?

~~~
lioeters
I think the parent comment was trying to be helpful for other readers who
might not know what TAOCP stood for, since it wasn't defined from the
beginning of the comment branch.

For what it's worth, I appreciated your defense of the book, that there's
genuine value in reading it, rather than as a "coffee table book" (I guess
social signalling); that Knuth explains things clearly and in detail, with
unique approach and insights.

~~~
svat
Ah that makes sense, thank you. Always good to explain acronyms; it just
didn't occur to me that it was a reply to the whole subtree of comments, so I
was confused how to respond.

------
omegaham
"In computing, we mostly stand on each other's feet."

-Richard Hamming

~~~
Frost1x
This reminds me of a Neil deGrasse Tyson quote to the effect of:

"Walk into a bookstore and look at the number of books on a topic. The more
books on a topic you see, the less we understand about the topic."

There's a lot of clashing perspectives on computing and modern software
architectures so I'd say Hamming is on the dot.

~~~
stainforth
Hamming is the compression guy right? I feel theres some extra connection seen
here in being able to compress down the redundant info in that section of the
bookstore

