Been doing this software thing for 35 years so I guess that makes me an old timer.
Technical books, especially for practitioners, that stay relevant over a long period of time are rather rare. I wish I could say that I've had time to study TAoCP or SICP, but I haven't.
Some of what I did find useful back in the day were: Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens, Stan Lippman's C++ book, Code Complete by Steve McConnell, the GoF Design Patterns book, Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Charniak and McDermott.
Whether, and to what extent, any of them are useful now is hard to say. Depends what you want to learn and what you're doing. The Charniak book, for example, is about classic "good old fashioned" AI, not the currently dominant connectionist approach. But it's LISP, and LISP is always relevant.
I'd also add The Systems Bible by John Gall as a book that influenced me. Its not a technology book though.
I’m not an old timer and I do read tech books on a weekly basis. It’s the only way for me to stay sharp in the industry. I also read documentation ofc. As for which books, the good ones.
In 1968 all we had was McCracken's short book on FORTRAN and a large number of utterly inpenetrable IBM manuals. When IBM finally came out with "FORTRAN Programmers Guide", it was revolutionary. Asking other programmers was very useful.
None of this is useful for you other than discussing things with fellow programmers.
Surprised no mention yet of The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System
Been doing this software thing for 35 years so I guess that makes me an old timer.
Technical books, especially for practitioners, that stay relevant over a long period of time are rather rare. I wish I could say that I've had time to study TAoCP or SICP, but I haven't.
Some of what I did find useful back in the day were: Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens, Stan Lippman's C++ book, Code Complete by Steve McConnell, the GoF Design Patterns book, Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Charniak and McDermott.
Whether, and to what extent, any of them are useful now is hard to say. Depends what you want to learn and what you're doing. The Charniak book, for example, is about classic "good old fashioned" AI, not the currently dominant connectionist approach. But it's LISP, and LISP is always relevant.
I'd also add The Systems Bible by John Gall as a book that influenced me. Its not a technology book though.
I'm not an old timers, but I have the following books in my library:
- The Design of the Unix Operating System
- The elements of programming style
- Code Complete, 2nd Edition
- The Art of Unix Programming
- Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
- TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1
I’m not an old timer and I do read tech books on a weekly basis. It’s the only way for me to stay sharp in the industry. I also read documentation ofc. As for which books, the good ones.
I’ve never done an online course or a bootcamp.
The Turbo Pascal manual was one of the best ever.
If you had access to a DEC based minicomputer, their wall of manuals was a perfect technical reference for their systems.
Knuth's series, the art of computer programming is a classic.
https://linux.die.net/man/
In 1968 all we had was McCracken's short book on FORTRAN and a large number of utterly inpenetrable IBM manuals. When IBM finally came out with "FORTRAN Programmers Guide", it was revolutionary. Asking other programmers was very useful.
None of this is useful for you other than discussing things with fellow programmers.
For a classic CS view around the year 2000:
* Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
* Engineering a Compiler
* The Elements of Computing Systems
A lot of the GNU manuals + Linux HOWTOs are pretty good for bash, make, coreutils, etc etc.
Don Knuths AoCP
SICP, Abelson and Sussman
Stroustrup
Aho and Ullman compilers
A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System
GNU C Library
Michael Kerrisks books are newer but are exceptional
K&R, Stevens, Borne’s shell book. Other books from the bell lab people.
Jon Bentley's original 2-volume "Programming Pearls". I haven't looked at the 2nd, single volume, edition.
Pike and Kernighan's "The Unix Programming Environment", and their later book "The Practice of Programming"
Usenix put out a refereed journal "Computing Systems" that was really good: https://www.usenix.org/publications/compsystems/computing-sy...
The C++ Programming Language by Stroutrup
Programming Perl (the camel book)
Unix I just kind of learned by using it.