Fans pick 40 books like Principles of Compiler Design

This book profoundly influenced my thinking process, combining the worlds of mathematics, art, and music. I was captivated by how the book explores the deep connections between Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Escher’s art, and Bach’s art of counterpoint.

The book’s puzzles and thought experiments pushed me to think more abstractly and critically. Despite being dense, I found it incredibly rewarding and eye-opening. I recommend this book to anyone interested in logic, creativity, and the nature of human thought. It’s a masterpiece!

Nagel’s book is the most understandable explanation I’ve found about one of the most cosmically seminal math proofs: Godel’s incompleteness theorem.

It takes the idea of recursion and self-reference to the ultimate conclusion about truth, understanding, and boundaries of existence. This may sound hootie-tootie, but think of the sequence of abstraction in math: arithmetic, algebra, calculus, etc.

Once you add in recursion (self-reference), you’ve got the most important concepts underlying true understanding and productivity in software – something never discussed in computer science, and certainly not in practical programming.

Think about the so-called Von Neumann computer architecture, which underlies all modern computers – instructions are data, stored in the same place as ordinary data, and some instructions write data that are instructions. This is recursion taken to the next level. 

This is the definitive book series on algorithms and the core of computer programming.

Unlike most such books, Knuth is a real programmer, deep into the details of the craft, to the point of creating his own assembler language and typesetting generation system. It’s partly the substance of the algorithms and their analysis, but even more is the way he models a way of thinking about and solving complexity that makes this a must-read series.

I learned my first programming language as a kid, and Basic always felt like a beginner’s language. It wasn’t until I started writing C that I felt in control of the machine. This book is a classic and was on every C-programmer’s shelf in the 80s and 90s. It isn’t the easiest read but is remarkably comprehensive for a relatively thin volume. The fact that it has been in print for over 30 years tells you something about its staying power.

Nowadays, I tend to code in higher level languages, but every once and a while I dip down, getting closer to the bare metal, and brush this baby off. It is probably one of my most well-worn books.

Building scalable and performant web applications is both an art and a science. This book focused on such techniques and hence goes beyond what most books on Django try to cover. Anyone running a Django site under heavy load will definitely learn a few tips from this book. However, it is light on explanations and expects you to figure out many things from reading the examples.

This multi-volume book is, for me, a masterpiece that goes far beyond just coding or algorithms or data structures, and serves as a profound exploration of algorithmic thinking and computer science's theoretical foundations, going deeply into the performance of algorithms and the behavior of data structures.

Knuth's meticulous approach, coupled with his clear and engaging prose (with occasional touches of humor) clearly explains complex concepts, and shows a deep understanding of the artistry inherent in solving computational problems.

Bill Gates said that anybody who went through all its volumes would get a job at his company, and I surely agree! I would recommend this book both for novice or seasoned programmers, because you will always find invaluable insights in it.

Michael Lopp, or Rands, as he is commonly known online, has been sharing his knowledge as a software manager for years, mainly through his blog. He is one of the most insightful voices about the art of management in a software environment, and even if you are not a manager yourself (and don’t want to become one), will make you understand and better collaborate with your own manager, and be ready when you need to lead a team or understand how it is to work with other humans.

This book is essential in that it follows a systematic and scientific approach to software development, advocating for clarity in expressing algorithms, providing a rigorous framework for designing and reasoning about programs, and, fundamentally, always focusing on formal methods and mathematical techniques to ensure correctness and efficiency in programming code.

Most importantly, the book doesn’t just show you how to prove programs correct, but also teaches how to arrive from a definition to an efficient and correct solution, so I would recommend this to every developer.

When I first heard about cryptography at university, it sounded like mathematical magic. After looking into some randomly chosen crypto books, I was discouraged from digging deeper because they were full of math details.

Understanding Cryptography was different. It was aimed at engineering students like me, and it provided me with the most relevant facts necessary for designing secure devices. Since then, it has always been a great reference book for me.

Okay, hear me out. Yes, this book was published in 2007. Yes, it’s ostensibly about ActionScript, the coding language in Flash, which no one uses anymore. But you won’t use this book to learn ActionScript or Flash: You’ll use it to learn how to make things move with code, in any language. You’ll skip over the ActionScript-specific parts in favor of the lucid explanations and helpful illustrations. Your visual brain will appreciate seeing how sines, cosines, and tangents are relevant—and necessary!—to make digital things move. (Your heart will wish your brain had paid better attention in trigonometry class years earlier, but hey, no regrets!) The chapters “Trigonometry for Animation” and “Velocity and Acceleration” alone are worth the purchase price.