Programming Books You Wish You Read Earlier

For those who are interested (and clearly there are quite a few of you who are) here are two previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19271766 (39 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19225964 (also 39 comments)

The reason I know there are people interested is because there are several earlier submissions without discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19243967

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19225658

Pet peeve of mine: people who recommend textbooks they haven't fully went through.

Going through Aho's Compilers and Norvig's AI takes at least one year (assuming you have a day job).

And since the author of the blog post obviously didn't read the books, he doesn't provide any pros and cons to spending that amount of time into any of them.

This feels terribly generic - a bunch of top-sellers, with helpful blurbs that could come off the back of the books (nothing about any of the descriptions gives the impression that the person has, say, read any of the books) and equally helpful Amazon affiliate links.

The only surprise was AI for Games, which I own, but do have some trouble believing is very current a full decade after it was published.

Ah look! Another generic Medium post of a list of programming books that come up first on Amazon's search list. Why do these people get attention?

"inside Windows File Formats" (ISBN 0-672-30338-8)

It's from 1993, I read it in 1998, but I wish I had read it in 1995.

I guarantee, if you read it now, you will wish you had read it at least 20 years ago.

Also, any Adobe Flash related books that you may have read in the last few years.

How many times does this need to get reposted?

I guess these posts generate a decent amount of revenue through the referral links.

This is basically the course texts of the first year of any BSc in CompSci