Five memorable books about programming (2008)

Posted by andsoitis 4 hours ago

Five memorable books about programming (2008)(prog21.dadgum.com)

59 points | 34 comments

rbanffy 5 minutes ago|

For me, the blue Smalltalk book by Adele Goldberg was deeply formative. It was computing done right and from first principles.

The other two formative experiences for me were using Cincom’s Mantis on the 3278 and Dataflex 2. Both made it obvious how quickly one could go from screen to persisted data, CRUD, application logic, and reporting with the right level of abstraction. Much later I described Dataflex as “Rails for the VT100”. Sadly, Cincom will not provide a hobby license to run it on an emulated 4381, and won’t even give away free manuals, and the company behind Dataflex (I don’t remember their name right now) seems to not even have any versions from that time. When I read Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages, it all clicked perfectly.

jrmg 1 hour ago||

Programmers at work: I bought a used copy of it - probably after reading this the first time it was posted. Great book, if you can find it.

Code, by Charles Petzold should be on any programmer’s list - and the list of anyone with curiosity about how the modern world works. It somehow manages the amazing trick of being readable for the novice, but also containing nuggets of insight for the expert all at the same time. Such a well written book.

rbanffy 13 minutes ago||

If, for nothing else, Programmers At Work has Bill Gates talking about dumpster diving for program listings.

The book is great - I love how Gary (IIRC) describes the centrality of data structures and how code kind of emerges from there.

so-cal-schemer 21 minutes ago||

Code and Elements of Computing Systems are two of the most recommended books (top 20) on HN according to a now defunct scraping site.

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL21015000W/Elements_of_Comput...

pan69 1 hour ago||

> The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086, yet it was published when the 80486 was showing up in high-end desktop PCs.

The book goes all the way up to discussing the 386. It's just that the foundations is rooted in 8086, which is a large chunk of the book.

My favorite books (or the ones I have spend most time with) and that have been most formative for me are:

Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan

Zen of Graphics Programming by Michael Abrash

The Zen Of Assembly Language by Michael Abrash

Programmer's Guide to the EGA, VGA, and Super VGA Cards by Richard F. Ferraro

The Indispensable PC Hardware Book by Hans-Peter Messmer

so-cal-schemer 1 hour ago||

Excellent. I was just looking for the title for Abrash's graphics book.

Another from the same publisher is

Assembly Language Magic: Programming for the 8088-80386 by William H. Murray

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2192212M/Assembly_language_m...

I really enjoyed my intro to RISC assembly:

SPARC Architecture, Assembly Language Programming, and C by Richard P. Paul

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9285324M/SPARC_Architecture_...

Any recommendations for VAX or 68k or 6502 assembly (or ARM)?

chj 1 hour ago||

> Programmer's Guide to the EGA, VGA, and Super VGA Cards by Richard F. Ferraro

This one is really good.

so-cal-schemer 2 hours ago||

How about Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus?

https://hop.perl.plover.com/

Some other great low flying titles:

The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561273/the-computational-bea...

The Nature of Computation by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens.

https://nature-of-computation.org/

Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dasgupta/book/index.html

and On Lisp, of course:

https://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

a-tk 1 hour ago|

I would also recommend Higher Order Perl. I went through it this summer after a recommendation. I don't know Perl, and found it was more focused on practical functional programming techniques, and provides creative and interesting justification for its topics, which can be rewritten in other languages too. Great book.

dang 2 hours ago||

Related. Others?

Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3917165 - May 2012 (1 comment)

Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128054 - March 2008 (14 comments)

so-cal-schemer 2 hours ago|

Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden comes up a lot in these discussions. One of my favorites.

JKCalhoun 3 hours ago||

“This is also one of the most bizarrely delayed technical book releases I can recall. The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086…”

I’m starting work on the (tentatively titled) “The Second Book of KIM.”

so-cal-schemer 3 hours ago||

These are great books. I was going to suggest Zen of Assembly Language and Leo Brodie's books for this list from last month:

Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read(https://readrare.com/)

191 points|miletus|29 days ago|67 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024055

Flow 2 hours ago||

My favorite two computer books are “Starting Forth” and “Let over Lambda”. It’s something about the language and the approach I like.

so-cal-schemer 10 minutes ago|

The intersection of these (illustrated-style ∩ Lisp) might be

Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!

by Conrad Barski

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16807102W/Land_of_Lisp

Though, I've seen some comments that some of the code isn't idiomatic or something; probably not a great book to learn Lisp from.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6905041-land-of-lisp

-- Not an easy book to get ahold of these days (like most of these)

pluc 1 hour ago||

Who reads programming books anymore? People don't even read code

adamddev1 1 hour ago|

The people who build all the solid, crucial parts of the infrastructure and tools that the vibe coders depend on. People who are pushing forward with new ideas. People who are building solid, snappy, delightful software. People who take joy in understanding the logic and creating solid, novel abstractions.

It is such a big category error to say "we're building simple apps without looking at code, therefore no one reads code anymore."

I'm not sure if this comment is meant as a little joke or observation, but I keep on seeing serious comments like this. It is serious anti-intellectualism to scoff at people reading programming books or understanding things.

perrygeo 15 minutes ago||

> People who are pushing forward with no ideas.

s/no/new ideas?

The people pushing forward with no ideas are likely not reading much either.

adamddev1 7 minutes ago|||

That was a typo - I meant new ideas

so-cal-schemer 8 minutes ago|||

Perhaps he was thinking of vibe coders.

s/ideas/understanding/

a glitch in the dialogue

srean 3 hours ago|

Rarely have I felt the urge to fly out of my building and grab any random guy on the street and exclaim can you see how cool this is, can you please.

That happened to me when I read The Little Schemer.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262560993/the-little-schemer/

(The other time was when I saw a Hasui)

https://ukiyo-e.org/artist/kawase-hasui

bigfishrunning 10 minutes ago||

After reading the little schemer, I bought two more copies just to lend out to people. It's that good.

so-cal-schemer 2 hours ago|||

With continuation(s) in this follow up:

The Seasoned Schemer

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561006/the-seasoned-schemer/

shmoil 3 hours ago||

What a weird book.

vincent-manis 1 hour ago|||

You don't like Japanese prints?

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