Peter Norvig's Library

I can personally recommend "Managing Gigabytes". It is very well written and contains a wealth of very valuable information--definitely worth its price!

Obviously, this answer depends on what you're interested in.

As for myself, I'm quite interested in LISP and making compliators/interpreters for it. Therefore On Lisp and Lisp in Small Pieces are books I'd recommend.

(No, I'm not going to tell you that LISP is going to change your life.)

I've used my GoodReads (http://www.goodreads.com/) account in the past for this sort of thing. I didn't realize that there was such a selection of these "share what books you're reading" kinds of sites!

Maybe he's read them all or maybe he's read some. A personal library doesn't mean a collection of books you've read or intend to read; they could simply be points of reference, whether it be the whole book, a chapter, a page or a paragraph.

He's been reading for years; he may very well have read them all. A book I read (much of) in college, Reading for Power and Flexibility, does point out that you don't always have to read a book cover to cover to get a lot of knowledge out of it. Some books I like a lot I start recommending long before I finish reading them, and I don't know whether or not Norvig might have the same approach to reading some books.

Umberto Eco values his library of many thousands for the books in it that he HASN'T read.

"Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? "

Why is this so surprising? I know many people who've read many thousands of books. I've read thousands of books cover to cover, I have about a thousand books in my library at home (about 300 ish technical books - I gave away another 300 or so) and I am still in my thirties (Fwiw I started reading by myself when I was 3. I buy a book every two weeks or so these days).

Even if you restrict the scope to technical books(assuming they have to be read relatively slowly) reading and completely understanding the content of a few hundred technical books is well within the scope of a human lifetime. It isn't even that hard if you work steadily in a disciplined fashion.

"And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense books."

"Density" is a function of what kind of background you already have. Dr.Norvig has a degree in Applied Math (Erdos number 4 I believe) and a PhD in Computer Science. I am sure he can read a "dense" tract faster than most people could. Also, most of those books (I own some of them) are textbooks. They aren't really all that "dense" (compared to a PhD thesis in Pure Mathematics, say). Most advanced material in CS/AI is in conference papers and rarely, if ever, make their way into textbooks till years after publication. I bet Peter Norvig reads a thousand or so papers every year. Every CS researcher I know does.

The man IS the director of research at Google. And before that he was a very highly-respected faculty member at Cal.

Yes, he's probably read all these books, probably most of which after he received his PhD. He's probably taught classes where many of them were required reading. In his own writing, he's probably cited items in this library hundreds of times

A bunch of the technical books, especially the textbook-ish and "handbook of X" ones, aren't books you "read" so much as "read the beginning of, then skim and refer to the rest". A common pattern is that there's general material in the first 10-50% of the book, which you probably want to read, then the latter parts of the book are series of specialized chapters and sub-sections on various techniques and variants of techniques. You wouldn't normally read every page of all of those in sequence, unless you were working really deeply in that exact area.

You can also often skip loads of stuff if you're reading for applications-focused reasons rather than looking to directly extend the techniques in question as part of theoretical research. I read a lot of logic papers, because I build tools on top of logic-programming systems, and I find that out of an 8-page paper, there's usually only 1-2 pages of material relevant to me. There'll be 1-2 pages of introducing a new construct, motivating why the construct is useful, sketching how it would be implemented and how it relates to other ideas; and then 6-7 pages of proofs showing that their extensions have all the soundness and whatever properties you want them to have. When I'm reading, I read those 6-7 pages as a single sentence in my head---"and now we prove that it works"---making for a nice 75%+ compression ratio.

Note that books appear more than once on that page, because they can be in multiple categories. That being said, it is entirely plausible that he has read them all in his career.

A fair question.

There are duplicates (Witten and Frank's "Data Mining", which is excellent), and some of the books he lists as favorites I would say are utter garbage. Some of them are so bad, I don't see how anybody smart could have read them and concluded they were worth reading.

That said, as far as the idea of reading that many books, I don't see how it's out of line. I read a lot, but not nearly as much as a professional researcher such as Norvig would. I have several hundred CS textbooks I've either read or skimmed pretty thoroughly, and most of my favorite professors had many more which they'd read cover to cover.

He wrote one of the most popular books on AI, so it would make sense that he read/digested a lot of books on the topic.

do you watch TV?

It is the first work to use the word "robot". I think that was in Asimov's preface to some edition of "I Robot".

But no, I haven't read it.

It's a boring and poorly written play, of historical interest only.

What really stood out for you about a mathematical text being typeset in (La)TeX? Were you also surprised by the popularity of No.2 pencils in elementary schools?

LinkedIn has one too... We really need some open platform to manage our identity online!