Do you credit any particular set of books for the advent of your expertise in math and/or computer science? The book that was of the right difficulty at the right time to ignite the intellectual curiousity that has made you go forward since.
Readit News
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
I failed the interview for an internship I really wanted in my 2nd year of engineering; I did get a shit internship that summer, but being really shaken at my incompetence, I took up this book, and quite honestly, it changed everything!
It truly sparked an interest in systems for me. The book helped me build a strong foundation in systems; Processes, memory, filesystems, networks, concurrency, synchronization and more. After reading OSTEP, it felt like an epiphany, and I charted a path for the rest of 2 years of college around distributed systems, systems research, and virtualization.
And the best part is that all this knowledge is free! Kudos to Professor Remzi and his work!
> Kudos to Professor Remzi
Please remember that Professor Andrea deserves equal recognition for her work on this book.
We were lucky to have a paperback low-cost-poorer-countries edition of The MINIX Book[1]. The code in the Minix book was an eye opener.The code clarifies the concept and sharpens the understanding.
Later on in my career as driver/firmware programmer, Computer Systems - A Programmers Perspective[2] and Unix Systems for Modern Architectures[3] helped a lot to clarify confusions and mysteries.
[1] https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Tanenbau... [2] https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Bryant-C... [3] https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Schimmel...
This alongwith Nand2Tetris course can make your understanding of computer and programming works almost complete.
I studied math in university and the book that really improved me mathematically was baby rudin. I really struggled with this the first time I worked through it and had to also fall back on Abott's analysis book, but after my first analysis course I worked through Rudin again and it just clicked. The exercises are really well chosen and the text is just so on point. Every sentence in the book is extremely carefully chosen and of fundamental importance to what Rudin wants to teach you.
It's really rare that you find textbooks that almost kind of have a certain magic to them, like you are directly taught by one of the greatest minds in that field. These two books definitely meet that criteria.
The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles (Nisan and Schocken)
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-second-Pri...
I'm not sure, but I think that when I looked into it, I found out that Code started from a level or two lower, but doesn't go up as many layers of abstraction as TEOCS.
Purely functional data structures by Chris Okasaki. Just totally changed my perspective about all sorts of things in computer science. As well as being one of the most advanced comp-sci books I've ever read, it's truly mind-expanding in every possible way. How many comp-sci books have you read that make you question how something as basic as a number is stored?
The introduction gives a history lesson, a great description of the method of exhaustion with descriptive drawings, and some very straightforward proofs on finding the area under the curve for parabolic segments via some basic infinite sums (no limits), all in 10 pages in a conversational style. And it just gets better from there.
My dad gave me his book he used in the 70s and I read it in high school in parallel to the textbook the school issued. Everyone thought I was some genius because I thought calculus was so obvious and I could explain it so well but I was just parroting the text and proofs from this book, basically verbatum. I told the other kids to use it as well but no one did.
That would probably be the second edition, published in 1967. The first edition was in 1961.
If you have a kid and they go to a college that uses Apostol you can give them your 2nd edition without worrying that it will be too far off from the current edition because the second edition is the current edition.
Same with volume 2. The 1969 second edition is the current edition. The first edition was in 1962.
Anyone happen to know of a list somewhere that lists subjects and for each gives you information on how well it can be learned from old books?
For undergraduate calculus for example a 50 year old textbook is fine. At worst some of the example and exercises might be outdated or maybe mildly sexist by today's standards.
On the other hand, that 20 year old book on learning Java with Symmantec Visual Cafe sitting on one of my bookshelves is probably nearly completely useless.
In between would be books where parts of them are still relevant and accurate and parts of them have been superseded and would at best only be worth reading for historical purposes.
Hah. I think I learned Java with that book as well, and used Visual Cafe starting out. I think one thing I did pick up (relatively) early was that books written to have a short shelf life were probably poor investments. Some "Word 6.0 for Dummies"-type book is probably meant to get someone up to speed that had pirated the program, and not a more general mind-expander that is going to lead you to thinking about how to implement some idea in whatever you're using today.
About halfway through the book, they build an explicit dispatch table, and I instantly understood 1) why my C code was so crappy, and B) why C++ and OO languages miss the boat (hint: they only implement the dispatch table in one orientation)
Worth struggling through, even if you never write a line of Lisp code. It has a lot in it about nice designs, abstraction barriers, and how languages actually work.
I remember reading some parts and thinking "wow, if someone had explained this to me like that when I was learning". But then, I'm not completely sure what would have been my experience if SICP was my first contact with CS. I started with GWBASIC, then COBOL, then C; 1st edition already existed by then, so I could have learned with Scheme!
- Discrete Mathematics with Applications, by Susanna Epp, or
- Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, by Kenneth Rosen (both have the same content, choose the style that you prefer), and
- Concrete Mathematics, by our lord and savior Donald Knuth.
I don't plan on reading TAOCP anymore as I would be dead by the time I finish reading everything else, but those introductory books are very good for beginners.
https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/linear-algebra
_Introduction to Quantum Mechanics_ by David Griffiths. Not CS or Math, but an amazing book because if you sit down and work through it it gives you a manageable intro to a completely non-intuitive and mysterious scientific field. Prerequisites are “only” multivariable calc and linear algebra.
_Algebra_ by Michael Artin. This was the book I decided to grind through at the right time to learn abstract algebra and get better at rigorous proofs, and it was worth it. Part of why I loved this book and subject is because it feels dry and mechanical at first, but if you work on it long enough you can see the beautiful bigger picture come together.
_Introduction to Topological Manifolds_ by John M. Lee. This was another “right book at the right time” for me. The title is a bit jargony, but it is a rigorous introduction to the foundational objects of modern geometry (namely topological spaces and manifolds in particular). Great warm-up for the first book on my list.
_Algebra: Chapter 0_ by Paulo Aluffi. Weird title, but the first few chapters are the best perspective on abstract algebra I’ve seen. He focuses early on categories in a useful and philosophically interesting way, which is unique.
_Gravitation_ by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. Didn’t read the whole thing, but this book taught me a tensor is just a higher-order linear function. Who knew? Most physicists give really crappy explanations of tensors. Also I love that this book, affectionately known as the “phone book”, is so heavy that one imagines spacetime curving around it.