Hacker News Reader

Comment by lghh | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good "baby's first CS papers"? I read maybe 1 paper in college and have not thought about anything more than the very practical, day-to-day applications of my degree since then. If I wanted to dip my toes into reading some CS papers are there any good places anyone would recommend to start?

View on HN

‘Time, clocks and the ordering of events in a distributed system’ by Leslie Lamport 1973. This is my favorite intro to distributed systems paper. Gives you a new tool to think with, and it’s a straightforward read.

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Strachey67.pdf

Fundamental Concepts In Programming by Christopher Strachey is awesome. It’s a lot less technical because it was based on a series of lecture notes. Christopher Strachey is also an inspiring figure in CS to me as someone who was a perpetual fuck up and a late bloomer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Strachey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_Concepts_in_Progra...

I have heard good things about https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ideas-created-future

I think the original DynamoDB paper is a good choice - some interesting CS/systems engineering content but relatively accessible.

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sos...

Notably, the Dynamo paper is _not_ a description of how DynamoDB (the product available from AWS today) works. They are fundamentally different, and it is not possible to implement notable features like conditional updates using the algorithms described in the Dynamo paper.

That’s interesting. I was going to take a stab at reading that first since I frequently use DynamoDB (Amazon product) at work.

If you’ve worked in the systems space, the Flash HTTPD paper is a classic: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix99/full_papers/pa...

“Why Functional Programming Matters” by John Hughes.

There's this nice mix of technical and opinion papers: 10 Papers Every Developer Should Read https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/10-papers-every-develo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com