A Crash Course in Computer Science: Reading List | Hacker News Reader

A Crash Course in Computer Science: Reading List

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33 pointsdmor12 comments

"Crash" suggests quick. I don't see anything quick about these books. Working through these would take many months of full-time work. Many of these books are references, not particularly suited to self-study.

@dmor, these are not a good introduction for non-technical people to start to learn about computer science. Try the coursera course https://www.coursera.org/course/cs101

Totally agree. You could probably spend years just studying the Cormen et. al text. Coursera is good too.

OTOH, better to spend your time and effort on the best, than to spend it in varying degrees of frustration with the relatively poor quality of alternatives.

In this sense, an excellent list of the best resources can indeed be part of a "crash" course. Because, going in, the student may not know what to pick, and without a good instructor/mentor/advisor -- whether in person or in video and text -- less optimal choices may considerably slow things down.

Submitting this primarily for my non-technical YC batchmates - Colin is a good friend of mine who was very supportive as I became a software developer. These are great resources from a tough but awesome teacher. Yes, this is on @Referly so Colin will earn money if you buy through his links.

Also, here is the blog post that accompanies this collection: http://jchenry.me/2011/05/26/Reading-List-%3AA-Crash-Course-...

I applaud the fact that this isn't just a post about "how to learn" to code; however, I think there is a need to specify that some of these references are not entirely necessary for a decent subset of programmers. For example, you listed Computer Organization and Design by Patterson & Hennessy. I think it's a fantastic book, and had to go through 11 chapters of it for the sake of a Stanford architecture class. The first few chapters almost feel like a must read for all, but unless you're going to be doing system stuff, i'm not sure it's really that important to know the intricate detail of pipelining.

Additionally, I think a good starting reference you may want to add for not-so-deeply technical folks is Computer Systems, A Programmer's Perspective by Bryant & O'Hallaron.

If someone wants to be a coder (rather than a research computer scientist) I think I'd recommend Sedgewick rather than CLR (and now S). CLR is awesome, but Sedgewick is a lot closer to actual coding practices IMO.

I would add the book 'Elements of Computing Systems' [1] by Nisan and Schocken (in addition to CS:APP) as a replacement for COD. COD is more of a reference book rather than a teaching one.

[1] http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/

Looks like 10 text books (read: ~$100 each) with no descriptions and referral links to Amazon.

edit for clarity.

The Dragon Book alone tops your estimate by about 15%.

I think he meant ~$100 each.

Here is the blog post that goes along with this - http://jchenry.me/2011/05/26/Reading-List-%3AA-Crash-Course-...

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