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Comment by pxska | Hacker News Reader

A very tough question. I feel that it might be quite hard to lure a curious person into Computer Science, who doesn't know anything about the field yet.

One of the books I liked (since I actually studied Linguistics in my Bachelor's) and what drew me towards CS was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.

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Code by Petzold is 100% my choice as well. It is an incredibly good book to describe not just code but computing and ultimately computing machines. I would give my 18 year old self Code and it would've done a very good job of piecing all the college courses that I would end up taking.

What about a book for Linguistics? I also studied Linguistics and now while I still find the knowledge useful (getting to describe to my son a voiced vs unvoiced plosive) I am not as interested in it anymore.

"don't sleep there are snakes" - half an adventure book, half linguistic analysis and explanation of a fairly unique language.

Very interested in this. I'm currently learning a second language and my programmer brain keeps getting side tracked by _human language as an abstraction_ in and of itself. I'd be very interested in a basic intro to linguistics book that starts from first principles and goes through what grammar fundamentally is, syntax, morphology, etc.

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Chomsky and Berwick if you're interested in some of the deeper questions in linguistics. It's a bit heavy but aimed at a general technical audience.

For general linguistics I've enjoyed a couple small books by Frank Palmer: "Grammar" and "Semantics".

I randomly picked Code off a library shelf when I was a child, not sure the exact age but probably 13 or earlier, and it drew me into programming.

I think maybe some of the history books could do it for cs. Like I'm very early into the book Crypto Anarchy, Cyber States and Pirate Utopias (2002 MIT PRESS), and it's kinda interesting. I'm not sure how the later parts are but chapter 1 is interesting. It definitely has an audience in mind but I think it could be an interesting book for someone outside of CS.

It stays interesting, or at least it did for me. A lot of the thoughts in there capture the spirit of reflection during a long since ended period of the Internet but there are some timeless ideas as well. Enjoy!

For me it was the german book "Das Chaos Computer Buch", which is basically a retelling of CCC shennanigans in the 80s. It has just the right mix of adventure, humour and technicality to get a 13 year old interested in hacking and computers.

Another one like code but even more gentle is Understanding the Digital World by Brian Kernighan

This was the exact book I came to suggest. How I wish I’d been handed this in my first year of university and not the dry textbooks teaching the same thing but making it about a dozen times more difficult.

This book was absolutely revolutionary for me

This was the book I thought of when I saw the title of this post.

The best book that I have read in the computer science.

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