Do you have a favorite programming book and if so, what is it?
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For me, it's a toss up between Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language, and Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger's The AWK Programming Language. Other books I remember from college days include Fortran IV With Watfor and Watfiv, and a two book set of Shelley & Cashman on Cobol. Those are all still around, somewhere in the attic, along with a lot of seriously outdated hardware. I know there's a 300 baud modem with the acoustic couplers for a standard Bell desk phone's handset up there, and a couple of cases of 80-column cards.
Plus one for this choice: Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language I taught myself C by reading and re-reading the second edition and everything was approachable, right through the end. "Qulatiy is Job #1"
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Not that I reading it anymore, but have a special place for my copy of PC Intern - System Programming by Michael Tischer... It is about DOS so mostly irrelevant, but I've learned a lot about how to see things from that book...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
For nostalgia, I still have IBM's Guide to Operations, and Technical Reference, for the PC; which included a source listing of the BIOS, printer codes, memory addresses, etc. Now you just go and buy a chip.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it. ― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I haven't touched it in a few decades but Starting Forth by Leo Brodie. And yes I am old!
Wow, Forth. There's a blast from the past! Unlike Cobol, I don't usually hear a lot about old software written in Forth. I can't remember the last time I've even heard it. :)
Real programmers use butterflies
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
Dan Appleman's Developing COM/ActiveX Components With Visual Basic 6. That book launched my career and did more to help me understand COM/ActiveX than anything else at the time. It didn't help me so much with C++ when I started learning it, but it helped me understand what I was trying to do with it at the time by quite a bit.
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
"A Discipline of Programming" by Dijkstra. He says in just a few pages what Knuth takes five volumes to express. https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Programming-Edsger-W-Dijkstra/dp/013215871X/[^]
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
"Code" by Charles Petzold.
It's an amazing book that helps tie software and hardware all together. I've learned stuff in that book that you cannot learn anywhere else. I guess maybe in high-level university courses maybe.
You might enjoy the Nand to Tetris courses and the book that goes with them: nand2tetris[^] The cover some of the same territory as Code but along the way you actually created a simulated computer and by the end of the whole thing, you're able to run Tetris on it.
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Wow, Forth. There's a blast from the past! Unlike Cobol, I don't usually hear a lot about old software written in Forth. I can't remember the last time I've even heard it. :)
Real programmers use butterflies
At one of the places I worked at I selected Forth (multitasking version I wrote) as an intermediate language. The PC would compile flow charts into Forth text files which would be downloaded to an industrial controller where the Forth interpreter/compile would compile it to machine code. Their system still uses it today.
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I'm not one for books, but if I had to pick one (besides my own, of course) I'd go with Robert C. Martin's Clean Code. That book changed the way I write and think about code. The beauty is that it applies to all languages that were, are or will ever be used, although it uses Java for examples. Come to think of it, if a Java book is my favorite it has to be REALLY VERY GOOD! :~
Best, Sander Azure Serverless Succinctly Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
C: A Reference Manual - by Harbison & Steele is what Kernighan & Ritchie wished they had written. It is superb. Cheerios
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C: A Reference Manual - by Harbison & Steele is what Kernighan & Ritchie wished they had written. It is superb. Cheerios
You may have replied to the wrong message because my post was neither about C nor Kernighan & Ritchie ;)
Best, Sander Azure Serverless Succinctly Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
C: A Reference Manual - by Harbison & Steele is what Kernighan & Ritchie wished they had written. It is superb. Cheerios
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I read Leslie Nielsen because I didn't expect to see any other Leslie on CP. Had to read it twice :laugh:
Best, Sander Azure Serverless Succinctly Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
Haha, I haven't read anything else by Dr. Lamport but this book was excellent. I feel like this topic (discrete representations of software systems including liveness, safety, and fairness properties) is one of those topics where in 10 years there will be some testing framework that will allow you to verify code against a specification which has itself been mathematically verified for correctness. There are some companies that have already used this concept for products (CosmosDB) but as far as I'm aware it requires manual verification of code against a spec which is tedious and time-consuming.
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K&R from decades gone by.
“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes”
That was a great book. Short and concise. You could get up and running in C in no time.
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
Andrew Troelsen's book on COM (COM ATL 3.0) and his earliest on C#. Both were easy to follow, easy to understand the code, and easy to understand the concepts.
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
When I was first learning C++, a friend recommended "Windows++" by Paul Dilascia (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=020160891X/andrewschulmanswA/[^]). Reading through it really opened my eyes to the why, and how, to use the language. It still resonates.
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Mine would be Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. It's mercifully short, and it teaches C++ the Right Way(TM) - the way Bjarne intended it to be used, and how it works best. It's suitable for beginners to C++ and in fact I recommend it for teaching C++, and it's the only one I'll recommend for that.
Real programmers use butterflies
Far above all other books IMHO is 'Code Complete', by Steve McConnell. It is language-agnostic, is unbelievably accessible, and has practical, philosopical and pragmatic pointers to truly excellent programming. Best book about coding that I *ever* bought!
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Far above all other books IMHO is 'Code Complete', by Steve McConnell. It is language-agnostic, is unbelievably accessible, and has practical, philosopical and pragmatic pointers to truly excellent programming. Best book about coding that I *ever* bought!
It's indeed a great book. I used to have a copy myself, and there are others here who had it as a favorite, too. :)
Real programmers use butterflies
