Here are 28 books that Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs fans have personally recommended if you like
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
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I boast a two-decade-long career in the software industry. Over the years, I have diligently honed my programming skills across a multitude of languages, including JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure. Throughout my career, I have taken on various management roles, from Team Leader to VP of Engineering. No matter the role, the thing I have enjoyed the most is to make complex topics easy to understand.
Naming and Necessity had a profound impact on my understanding of the importance of using proper names in programming (for functions, variables, etc.). I was fascinated by Kripke’s exploration of the usage of names in our day-to-day language. His arguments challenged my thinking and introduced me to new ways of considering reference and meaning.
The clarity and rigor of his analysis pushed me to refine my reasoning skills. Despite being a challenging read, I found it incredibly rewarding.
'Naming and Necessity' has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here reissued in a newly corrected form with a new preface by the author. If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics, or in philosophy of language, this is it.
The art of computer programming is a lot like the art of writing: It's not just about what your program says but about how it says it. One of the reasons I like the C and C++ languages—which I picked up in the late 1990s and haven't put down since—is that, as compiled, non-sandboxed languages, they promise total control over the machine. Show me where you want each byte of data to go in memory; show me the machine instructions you want; and I can make C++ do that for you.
Every "computer person" should read GEB at least once. Preferably in high school, when you still have the free time to dive deep into all the recreational math exercises. If you're already working 40-hour weeks and wonder who has time for Hofstadter's 750-page "metaphorical fugue on minds and machines," all I can say is: Better late than never!
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Goedel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.
I have always been fascinated by the magic that happens at the intersection of bits and atoms. Circuits, sensors, and algorithms, for better or worse, have permeated every part of our lives. It’s impossible to understand our environment now without understanding the subtle influence of the code that manages and monitors it.
With this textbook disguised as a novel, Goldratt tells a story that sneaks up on you, revealing how simple digital thinking—like tracking bottlenecks and using systems analysis—can revolutionize physical processes. It’s not just about manufacturing; it’s about seeing challenges as opportunities to improve again and again.
This is a story about inspiration and being ready to look at the world differently to make every process—from your own projects to global operations—run a little smoother.
*A Graphic Novel version of this title is now available: "The Goal: A Business Graphic Novel"
30th Anniversary Edition. Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry - even to your bosses - but not to your competitors. Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
My life has been about programming for as long as I can remember. Learning to code was a way to connect with my dad and express my creativity at a young age. Since I grew up with code, it became the way I understood the world; often I could look at a process or program and immediately see its source code in my mind. I developed a very strong sense of aesthetics searching for “perfect code,” which for me was code that was not only error-free but resistant to errors. My studies, research, and career is about moving myself and all programmers closer to that goal: Software that never fails.
Continuing down the engineering part of this mini-curriculum, we have a collection of interesting ideas, each written by a different author, all of them inspiring.
Some of the chapters in this book I have reread more times than I can count, because the ideas are so original and intriguing that my fingers start to tingle.
How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes. This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to…
My life has been about programming for as long as I can remember. Learning to code was a way to connect with my dad and express my creativity at a young age. Since I grew up with code, it became the way I understood the world; often I could look at a process or program and immediately see its source code in my mind. I developed a very strong sense of aesthetics searching for “perfect code,” which for me was code that was not only error-free but resistant to errors. My studies, research, and career is about moving myself and all programmers closer to that goal: Software that never fails.
Having worked with an untyped functional language the next logical step is to add types on top, and how to get a better understanding than by implementing the type system yourself.
This book takes you through all the interesting kinds and variations of type systems, and you get to implement them yourself using one of my absolute favorite languages (OCaml).
A comprehensive introduction to type systems and programming languages.
A type system is a syntactic method for automatically checking the absence of certain erroneous behaviors by classifying program phrases according to the kinds of values they compute. The study of type systems—and of programming languages from a type-theoretic perspective—has important applications in software engineering, language design, high-performance compilers, and security.
This text provides a comprehensive introduction both to type systems in computer science and to the basic theory of programming languages. The approach is pragmatic and operational; each new concept is motivated by programming examples and the more theoretical sections…
My life has been about programming for as long as I can remember. Learning to code was a way to connect with my dad and express my creativity at a young age. Since I grew up with code, it became the way I understood the world; often I could look at a process or program and immediately see its source code in my mind. I developed a very strong sense of aesthetics searching for “perfect code,” which for me was code that was not only error-free but resistant to errors. My studies, research, and career is about moving myself and all programmers closer to that goal: Software that never fails.
The building blocks of software are algorithms, so here our journey continues after you have established a deep understanding of programming languages.
Modern software is predominantly distributed, and since this book doesn't assume much it is the perfect introduction to algorithm analysis, concurrency, and distributed systems. And the best part is that you can just jump in and build these algorithms yourself.
The new edition of a guide to distributed algorithms that emphasizes examples and exercises rather than the intricacies of mathematical models.
This book offers students and researchers a guide to distributed algorithms that emphasizes examples and exercises rather than the intricacies of mathematical models. It avoids mathematical argumentation, often a stumbling block for students, teaching algorithmic thought rather than proofs and logic. This approach allows the student to learn a large number of algorithms within a relatively short span of time. Algorithms are explained through brief, informal descriptions, illuminating examples, and practical exercises. The examples and exercises allow readers to…
My life has been about programming for as long as I can remember. Learning to code was a way to connect with my dad and express my creativity at a young age. Since I grew up with code, it became the way I understood the world; often I could look at a process or program and immediately see its source code in my mind. I developed a very strong sense of aesthetics searching for “perfect code,” which for me was code that was not only error-free but resistant to errors. My studies, research, and career is about moving myself and all programmers closer to that goal: Software that never fails.
This tour of programming is a humorous reminder that we should always question our assumptions.
This book presents example after example of very simple Java programs all of which behave differently than you expect. It's both humbling and so provocative that you have to go into an editor and see if their claims are true.
"Every programming language has its quirks. This lively book reveals oddities of the Java programming language through entertaining and thought-provoking programming puzzles."
--Guy Steele, Sun Fellow and coauthor of The Java (TM) Language Specification
"I laughed, I cried, I threw up (my hands in admiration)."
--Tim Peierls, president, Prior Artisans LLC, and member of the JSR 166 Expert Group
How well do you really know Java? Are you a code sleuth? Have you ever spent days chasing a bug caused by a trap or pitfall in Java or its libraries? Do you like brainteasers? Then this is the book for…
I boast a two-decade-long career in the software industry. Over the years, I have diligently honed my programming skills across a multitude of languages, including JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure. Throughout my career, I have taken on various management roles, from Team Leader to VP of Engineering. No matter the role, the thing I have enjoyed the most is to make complex topics easy to understand.
I found Normand’s focus on functional programming techniques incredibly practical and enlightening. Despite its technical content, I found the book accessible and engaging.
I believe this book is essential for anyone looking to tame complexity in their code. It’s a book I revisit when I need to explain the power of functional programming to my colleagues.
Distributed across servers, difficult to test, and resistant to modification-modern software is complex. Grokking Simplicity is a friendly, practical guide that will change the way you approach software design and development. It introduces a unique approach to functional programming that explains why certain features of software are prone to complexity, and teaches you the functional techniques you can use to simplify these systems so that they're easier to test and debug.
Available in PDF (ePub, kindle, and liveBook formats coming soon). about the technologyEven experienced developers struggle with software systems that sprawl across distributed servers and APIs, are filled with…
I'm a programmer with a desire to constantly learn and improve. I have many years of experience in writing mission-critical software in highly event-driven areas such as FinTech and online auctions. Through interesting and challenging projects, I've always been fascinated by trying to generalize and abstract what it is that makes good code; so things like design patterns and best practices were just up my street. As I expanded this personal research, I found that functional programming provided many interesting techniques, but that many professionals in the industry were unaware of them. This is why I decided to show these techniques and their benefits to a wider audience through my book Functional Programming in C#.
For many years I did not question the validity of the language I was using, focussing instead on becoming good at getting it to do what was needed. It never occurred to me that, say, the type system could be flawed, causing extra work and allowing unnecessary bugs to seep in.
But what if, instead of writing validation code, you could define your types in a way that makes it impossible to create an invalid instance? What if you could define state transitions in such a way that a state machine cannot transition into an invalid state? These are indeed some of the things the Idris language allows.
In his book Type-Driven Development with Idris, Edwin Brady takes you through both the ideas of type-driven development, and how they're enabled in Iris. Iris looks a lot like Haskell, but better. It even has a unique solution for the complex issue…
With over a decade of experience in web development using Clojure and active involvement in the Clojure open source community, I have gathered invaluable insights into effective use of the language. I am eager to share some of the experience and knowledge I have acquired with those new to the language.
The Clojure ecosystem presents a multifaceted landscape that can pose a significant challenge for novices, thereby rendering the language itself daunting to approach. However, this comprehensive book aims to alleviate these complexities by providing a guided pathway for readers to construct practical web applications using Clojure.
By following the structured framework within these pages, readers will not only gain a deeper understanding of the language's nuances but also acquire essential proficiency in employing it efficiently. Furthermore, this authoritative resource elucidates numerous best practices, empowering readers to cultivate a skillset that maximizes their effectiveness in utilizing Clojure to its fullest potential.
This book is a great choice for Clojure beginners because it takes the reader through pragmatic examples of using the language, and applying its features effective to solve real-world problems.
Think in the Clojure way! Once you're familiar with Clojure, take the next step with extended lessons on the best practices and most critical decisions you'll need to make while developing. Learn how to model your domain with data, transform it with pure functions, manage state, spread your work across cores, and structure apps with components. Discover how to use Clojure in the real world, and unlock the speed and power of this beautiful language on the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure Applied gives you the practical, realistic advice and depth of field that's been missing from your development practice. You…
