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Five memorable books about programming (2008)

46 points • by andsoitis • today at 5:30 PM • 21 comments • view on HN

Comments

pan69 • today at 8:27 PM

> The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086, yet it was published when the 80486 was showing up in high-end desktop PCs.

The book goes all the way up to discussing the 386. It's just that the foundations is rooted in 8086, which is a large chunk of the book.

My favorite books (or the ones I have spend most time with) and that have been most formative for me are:

Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan

Zen of Graphics Programming by Michael Abrash

The Zen Of Assembly Language by Michael Abrash

Programmer's Guide to the EGA, VGA, and Super VGA Cards by Richard F. Ferraro

The Indispensable PC Hardware Book by Hans-Peter Messmer

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so-cal-schemer • today at 8:13 PM

How about Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus?

https://hop.perl.plover.com/

Some other great low flying titles:

The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561273/the-computational-bea...

The Nature of Computation by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens.

https://nature-of-computation.org/

Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dasgupta/book/index.html

and On Lisp, of course:

https://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

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dang • today at 7:37 PM

Related. Others?

Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3917165 - May 2012 (1 comment)

Five Memorable Books About Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128054 - March 2008 (14 comments)

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Flow • today at 7:32 PM

My favorite two computer books are “Starting Forth” and “Let over Lambda”. It’s something about the language and the approach I like.

so-cal-schemer • today at 7:07 PM

These are great books. I was going to suggest Zen of Assembly Language and Leo Brodie's books for this list from last month:

Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read(https://readrare.com/)

191 points|miletus|29 days ago|67 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024055

pluc • today at 8:21 PM

Who reads programming books anymore? People don't even read code

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JKCalhoun • today at 7:09 PM

“This is also one of the most bizarrely delayed technical book releases I can recall. The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086…”

I’m starting work on the (tentatively titled) “The Second Book of KIM.”

srean • today at 6:31 PM

Rarely have I felt the urge to fly out of my building and grab any random guy on the street and exclaim can you see how cool this is, can you please.

That happened to me when I read The Little Schemer.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262560993/the-little-schemer/

(The other time was when I saw a Hasui)

https://ukiyo-e.org/artist/kawase-hasui

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so-cal-schemer • today at 8:30 PM

Another on my reading list:

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Gregor Kiczales et al

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4088774W/The_art_of_the_meta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Metaobject_Prot...

jdw64 • today at 7:18 PM

Software Design for Flexibility (2021) This book left the deepest impression on me. I was fascinated by the concept of additive programming. Personally, I spent a good while thinking about and studying the idea of "evolvability." True, the overuse of flexibility can obscure control flow, and opinions on the book are divided but I learned many concepts from it. Since I often work on maintaining and modifying legacy code, this book was a great help.

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