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  3. Good books about (famous/known) programmers ?

Good books about (famous/known) programmers ?

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  • M Maximilien

    Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ? A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue. Any suggestions ? Thanks, Max.

    I'd rather be phishing!

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    raddevus
    wrote on last edited by
    #9

    My favorite modern bio (actually autobiography) of a well known amazing computer engineer is Wozniak's book. It's a lot of fun, candid and a great story of a life of engineering. Amazon.com: iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon eBook: Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith: Kindle Store[^]

    My book, Launch Your Android App, is available at Amazon.com.

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    • R raddevus

      If you like math there is a book about Turing and his papers and what they taught us about computing by a modern developer who is a fantastic writer (Charles Petzold): The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine: Charles Petzold: 9780470229057: Amazon.com: Books[^]

      My book, Launch Your Android App, is available at Amazon.com.

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      k5054
      wrote on last edited by
      #10

      Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges is a great biography. Don't let the fact that this was the inspiration for "The Imitation Game" be of concern. In typical Hollywood style, the movie takes many liberties with the facts. If you're interested in computer history, then perhaps The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder might be of interest. This details the design and construction of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000/8000. It was published in 1981, and won the 1982 Pulitzer prize for non fiction.

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      • M Maximilien

        Why sorry ? It is the kind of reference my friends will love to look into.

        I'd rather be phishing!

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        James McCullough
        wrote on last edited by
        #11

        Sorry because 1) it wasn't a book, and 2) I think most people that you ask about famous programmers will likely whip her out... Although, when it came to data sciences, she was about 150 - 200 years ahead of her time.

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        • A Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan

          Alan Turing[^]? Dennis Ritchie[^]? Bjarne Stroustrup[^]? I'm sorry there isn't a page yet for a programmer named, "Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan". Someday when there will be, I'd send you the link for that too. :-)

          The shit I complain about It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem ~! Firewall !~

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          Maximilien
          wrote on last edited by
          #12

          Wikipedia is not really what I was looking for.

          I'd rather be phishing!

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          • M Maximilien

            Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ? A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue. Any suggestions ? Thanks, Max.

            I'd rather be phishing!

            R Offline
            R Offline
            Ryan Peden
            wrote on last edited by
            #13

            It isn't exactly a biography, but I've always enjoyed Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. It's a series of Q&A style interviews of a pretty diverse set of well known programmers: - Frances Allen: \Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow - Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang - Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google - Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger - Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! - L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 - Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation - Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal - Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer - Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler - Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX - Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI - Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress - Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX - Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker

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            • M Maximilien

              Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ? A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue. Any suggestions ? Thanks, Max.

              I'd rather be phishing!

              M Offline
              M Offline
              Marc Clifton
              wrote on last edited by
              #14

              Well, it's not in book form, but there's Marc Clifton[^] and in e-book format, also by Marc Clifton: Syncfusion Free Ebooks | Web Servers Succinctly[^] Syncfusion Free Ebooks | Unit Testing Succinctly[^] Syncfusion free ebooks | Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly[^] :rolleyes: Marc

              Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny

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              • A Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan

                Alan Turing[^]? Dennis Ritchie[^]? Bjarne Stroustrup[^]? I'm sorry there isn't a page yet for a programmer named, "Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan". Someday when there will be, I'd send you the link for that too. :-)

                The shit I complain about It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem ~! Firewall !~

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                Lost User
                wrote on last edited by
                #15

                Try this one: The Wonderful Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan[^]. ;P

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                • M Marc Clifton

                  Well, it's not in book form, but there's Marc Clifton[^] and in e-book format, also by Marc Clifton: Syncfusion Free Ebooks | Web Servers Succinctly[^] Syncfusion Free Ebooks | Unit Testing Succinctly[^] Syncfusion free ebooks | Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly[^] :rolleyes: Marc

                  Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny

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                  raddevus
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #16

                  Thanks for sharing. I'm going to read that web server one as soon as I get a chance. :thumbsup:

                  My book, Launch Your Android App, is available at Amazon.com.

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                  • M Maximilien

                    Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ? A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue. Any suggestions ? Thanks, Max.

                    I'd rather be phishing!

                    K Offline
                    K Offline
                    KarstenK
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #17

                    "Art of war" by Sun Tsu: it helps to kiss ass managers :cool:

                    Press F1 for help or google it. Greetings from Germany

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                    • M Maximilien

                      Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ? A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue. Any suggestions ? Thanks, Max.

                      I'd rather be phishing!

                      L Offline
                      L Offline
                      Lost User
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #18

                      Umm, not sure what Bill Gates has personally programmed by himself except maybe QBasic and Steve Jobs didn't do programming at all. They were business people and entrepreneurs. They used to hire programmers.

                      it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

                      enhzflepE M 2 Replies Last reply
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                      • M Maximilien

                        Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ? A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue. Any suggestions ? Thanks, Max.

                        I'd rather be phishing!

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                        G Offline
                        gardnerp
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #19

                        I enjoyed Show Stopper! It covers a number of programmers including Dave Cutler. [^]

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                        • L Lost User

                          Umm, not sure what Bill Gates has personally programmed by himself except maybe QBasic and Steve Jobs didn't do programming at all. They were business people and entrepreneurs. They used to hire programmers.

                          it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

                          enhzflepE Offline
                          enhzflepE Offline
                          enhzflep
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #20

                          FAT was apparently done by him... during a flight, no less! Link left for the fun that's in the comments: I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake[^] Highlights: ■ "Noobies, each and every one of you. I built a NAND gate in 1924 using twigs and moss. For delay lines I used a box canyon, and moved about until the acoustic echo distribution in the time domain performed the required function. By May 1925 I had calculated Pi to almost one digit accuracy: 4." ■ "This has to be a myth. FAT predates laptops or any other computer that would reasonably be usable on an airplane. [You kids say the cutest things. -Raymond]" ■ "(I can’t believe I had to write this: This is a dramatization, not a courtroom transcript.) This “I wrote FAT on an airplane” line was apparently one Bill used when he wanted to complain that what other people was doing wasn’t Real Programming. But this time, the development manager decided she’d had enough. “Fine, Bill. We’ll set you up with a machine fully enlisted in the Windows source code, and you can help us out with some of your programming magic, why don’t you.” This shut him up."

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                          • M Maximilien

                            Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ? A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue. Any suggestions ? Thanks, Max.

                            I'd rather be phishing!

                            C Offline
                            C Offline
                            Camilo Reyes
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #21

                            K&R comes to mind. Best book ever crafted! The first to introduce to the world a "Hello, World" in pure C :cool:

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                            • M Marc Clifton

                              Well, it's not in book form, but there's Marc Clifton[^] and in e-book format, also by Marc Clifton: Syncfusion Free Ebooks | Web Servers Succinctly[^] Syncfusion Free Ebooks | Unit Testing Succinctly[^] Syncfusion free ebooks | Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly[^] :rolleyes: Marc

                              Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny

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                              C Offline
                              Camilo Reyes
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #22

                              Real cool dude, seriously :cool:

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                              • L Lost User

                                Umm, not sure what Bill Gates has personally programmed by himself except maybe QBasic and Steve Jobs didn't do programming at all. They were business people and entrepreneurs. They used to hire programmers.

                                it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

                                M Offline
                                M Offline
                                Mark_Wallace
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #23

                                Um, he and his mates were the ones that made "writing code in your Mother's garage, while blasting out hard rock" famous, when they wrote MSDOS* * You can skip googling the MSDOS/QDOS-86 thing. I know. And everyone here should be aware that upgrading something like QDOS-86 to become MSDOS (and to be used on different hardware, which was much more of a minefield, back then) was no small thing.

                                I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

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                                • J James McCullough

                                  Ada Lovelace? [^] (Sorry, couldn't help it.)

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                                  Forogar
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #24

                                  Unfortunately, most non-IT people would think you meant to reference Linda Lovelace [^]"!

                                  - I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

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