
Books and papers every graduate student should read - fogus
http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-graduate-students/
======
stiff
I 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
mattmight 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.

~~~
stiff
Even 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.

~~~
Retric
He did not give a list of books for everyone to read just suggesting 4 books
to be used as references for graduate level writing which I find hard to argue
with. Along with one for presentations and persuasion which you are going to
do so I doin't think there is as much to argue with as you might think.

------
yaddayadda
I'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.

~~~
igravious
In 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
It'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
Terminal 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.

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cmeiklejohn
I've been putting together a similar list for graduate students of computer
science focusing in distributed systems:

[http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07...](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings-
in-distributed-systems.html)

Edited to add HN link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6036183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6036183)

~~~
numbers
Thanks for this list!

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dnautics
LaTeX 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.

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znowi
Wait, is this baity title the work of the submitter? The actual article is
much less sensational: "Reading for graduate students".

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impendia
To 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/14000...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Finer-Points-Sausage-
Dogs/dp/1400095085/)

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.

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waster
I would argue that every _adult_ should read the resources in the first few
categories. Really excellent.

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dschiptsov
One 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.

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ctdonath
Alas, 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
I 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/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Lambda-
Calculus-Syntax-Semantics/dp/184890066X/)

------
cldr
Pretty 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.

------
seanmcdirmid
Might'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.

------
gtani
Baez' 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)

------
cschmidt
I 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.)

------
aet
I 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
A writing book is a good idea, but not Strunk and White:
[http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-
Grammar/2549...](http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-
Grammar/25497)

I prefer "Write Right!", although the most recent edition is needlessly long.

~~~
aet
Interesting criticism, but not sure I'm convinced.

------
graycat
I 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.

------
_random_
No, they aren't.

