My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Four | Hacker News Reader

My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Four

catonmat.net

91 pointsnoobie15 comments

I am so sorry, but The Little/Seasoned ... books are all bad books, they are repeating all the time, but they are NOT Iliad, NOT Odyssey, NOT HOMER epic at all. The little schemer and and The Seasoned Schemer I have both read two times , but all can't hold to end. I have read SICP, Simply Scheme, the realm of racket，Practical Common lisp, the joy of clojure, they are all the best, i like them and learned many more from them. Yes i also have learned some thing from The little ... books, but very little compared to 600 pages, indeed if the 600 pages three books can compress to a 100 pages book, then it will be good, may be a best book like many best programmer says, but they didn't do that, they will be 600 pages full of stupid stars and senseless talks forever, so i say they are the worst classic programming books i have read. I really don't know why why the adult human will like the little ..., the little ... are not HOMER epic, how did they repeat and repeat and repeat at pains? Beacuse that seems fun? that seems like fairy tales? I think no, i love Narnia series, Andersen storys, BUT i hate all the little ... books. I don't think i am the only one in the world hate them, but love SICP HOMER epic and Narnia. Please tell why you hate or like the little ... books, or if you can change my thought. I want to know.

I really like many of the books he has posted.

I'd definitely rate CTM in the top 2 programming books I've ever read. I think it's the modern sequel to SICP and it doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves (due to the choice of Mozart/Oz I guess).

What are the pros and cons of CTM as compared to SICP? The latter is very "tight"(like most math texts) for lack of a better word. I find programming (even academical ones) books a bit tiring to read because they don't proceed like typical math texts: very concise explanation -> lemma -> theorem -> proof -> corollary -> very concise elaboration. I get lost if a textbook is not written in that "tight" format. Is CTM close in spirit to SICP? Thanks.

It's pretty mathematical. In some respects, it contains more CS formalisms than SICP---but it's not too hardcore.

For example, last chapter defines all the operational semantics of their language.

Mind the authors come from the logic programming community, so the book is quite tight.

You can check out a preprint version free online. (Google suggests http://www.epsa.org/forms/uploadFiles/3B6300000000.filename.... though I can't trivially tell if that's the author's official free version, since the official book site has some https problem Firefox is complaining to me about.)

SICP explores real, interesting programs: a digital circuit simulator, an automatic differentiator, etc., in a sense it explores mathematics and electrical engineering in parallel to computer science and shows a certain unity between all three disciplines, at the cost of requiring more background to understand everything.

CTM explores a lot more programming language concepts than SICP, but the examples and exercises seem to be focused on illustrating those individual concepts in the simplest way possible. I think CTM is ultimately a more down-to-the earth book - you are likely to have more immediate direct use for the things you learn compared to SICP, but it doesn't give you this very high level perspective that SICP does.

I don't think I fully agree with this. CTM is intended for at least sophomore CS students. SICP was intended for a more general engineering audience. That explains some of the links with EE SICP tries to show, whereas CTM concentrates on programming paradigms---some quite exotic.

CTM, since it's not in the referenced article:

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models-Computer-Pr...

I did not know about "proofs without words", it looks brilliant!

Glad too see that I am not the only person to quite excited about the The Little Prover. Don't think I have ever felt this way about the release of a CS book.

nice blog list also the networking top down approach is a really important book also a book on how linux works with the networking is great as well (http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Architecture-Design-Implementation... )

And he is a Perl lover! Sweet!

I am wondering if this is just a simple hack to generate some passive income by having 10 blog posts filled with reference links to the book sites on Amazon. Food for thought. shrugs

Why the downvotes?

The little... books are just different, not fun.

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