Peter Norvig's Library

http://books.google.com/books?uid=8640673873589796416

by fogus • 16 years ago

174 48 16 years ago

books.google.com

cma• 16 years ago

Huge mass of stuff to sort through; I highly recommend "The Human Use of Human Beings." Anyone have other recommendations from the lists?

sb2• 16 years ago

I can personally recommend "Managing Gigabytes". It is very well written and contains a wealth of very valuable information--definitely worth its price!

kirubakaran• 16 years ago

I see that it was published in 1999. Is it still relevant today?

JeanPierre• 16 years ago

Obviously, this answer depends on what you're interested in.

As for myself, I'm quite interested in LISP and making compliators/interpreters for it. Therefore On Lisp and Lisp in Small Pieces are books I'd recommend.

(No, I'm not going to tell you that LISP is going to change your life.)

irahul• 16 years ago

I am confused. Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? I believe he won't mark something as favorite if he hasn't read it. I scrolled about 10 pages trying to see how many books are there and then gave up.

How does he find the time to do it? I have read a decent number of books, but compared to his numbers, mine looks like a rounding error.

And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense books.

bombs• 16 years ago

Maybe he's read them all or maybe he's read some. A personal library doesn't mean a collection of books you've read or intend to read; they could simply be points of reference, whether it be the whole book, a chapter, a page or a paragraph.

tokenadult• 16 years ago

He's been reading for years; he may very well have read them all. A book I read (much of) in college, Reading for Power and Flexibility, does point out that you don't always have to read a book cover to cover to get a lot of knowledge out of it. Some books I like a lot I start recommending long before I finish reading them, and I don't know whether or not Norvig might have the same approach to reading some books.

Kaizyn2• 16 years ago

Umberto Eco values his library of many thousands for the books in it that he HASN'T read.

Kaizyn2• 16 years ago

It's also worth pointing out that if you read 3 books a year, you would have read 90 books in a 30 year time span. I would suspect that Norvig reads a good deal more than that and that this selection of books for his book shelf does not represent everything he has read or owns.

Jun8• 16 years ago

Excellent point! @irahul, I see that you view a library as the storage place for the books that one has read. It should come as a surprise that most researchers/scholars view their private libraries not in this way, they view it as a source of information of mostly unread books.

You should definitely read Eco's essay titled 'How to Justify a Private Library' in his collection How to Travel with a Salmon. In it, he discusses his answer to precisely the same question that you have put forth. Here's how he fantasizes answering the question "Oh, what a large number of books you have! Have you read them all?"

"In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. ’I haven’t read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?’ But this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up: ’And where do you put them after you’ve read them?’ The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: ’And more, dear sir, many more,’ which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have falled back upon the riposte: ’No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office,’ a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other hand leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure."

plinkplonk• 16 years ago

"Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? "

Why is this so surprising? I know many people who've read many thousands of books. I've read thousands of books cover to cover, I have about a thousand books in my library at home (about 300 ish technical books - I gave away another 300 or so) and I am still in my thirties (Fwiw I started reading by myself when I was 3. I buy a book every two weeks or so these days).

Even if you restrict the scope to technical books(assuming they have to be read relatively slowly) reading and completely understanding the content of a few hundred technical books is well within the scope of a human lifetime. It isn't even that hard if you work steadily in a disciplined fashion.

"And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense books."

"Density" is a function of what kind of background you already have. Dr.Norvig has a degree in Applied Math (Erdos number 4 I believe) and a PhD in Computer Science. I am sure he can read a "dense" tract faster than most people could. Also, most of those books (I own some of them) are textbooks. They aren't really all that "dense" (compared to a PhD thesis in Pure Mathematics, say). Most advanced material in CS/AI is in conference papers and rarely, if ever, make their way into textbooks till years after publication. I bet Peter Norvig reads a thousand or so papers every year. Every CS researcher I know does.

wisty• 16 years ago

I've heard him called the no. 1 AI guy, in the world. He's basically Google's head researcher, and used to head search quality, he's been big in NASA, worked in industry, and written the no. 1 AI book for students.

I expect he's had to read a few books to get to where he is.

Also, he probably knew 80% of the content before he read it. Most of those books will have a chapter on vectors, a chapter on probability, a chapter on information (etc), and he's mastered that years ago ...

bl4k2• 16 years ago

because the subject of these books is not read, it is learnt

I can also skim through TCP/IP Ill. SICP, Dragon book, and say that I have 'read' them, but the impressive thing here is that Norvig is super smart, and probably has not only read all of these books, but understands them all.

swah• 16 years ago

Do you allocate some fixed time or number of pages as a goal to read every day ?

When I start programming it takes up all available time..

hack_edu• 16 years ago

The man IS the director of research at Google. And before that he was a very highly-respected faculty member at Cal.

Yes, he's probably read all these books, probably most of which after he received his PhD. He's probably taught classes where many of them were required reading. In his own writing, he's probably cited items in this library hundreds of times

_delirium2• 16 years ago

A bunch of the technical books, especially the textbook-ish and "handbook of X" ones, aren't books you "read" so much as "read the beginning of, then skim and refer to the rest". A common pattern is that there's general material in the first 10-50% of the book, which you probably want to read, then the latter parts of the book are series of specialized chapters and sub-sections on various techniques and variants of techniques. You wouldn't normally read every page of all of those in sequence, unless you were working really deeply in that exact area.

You can also often skip loads of stuff if you're reading for applications-focused reasons rather than looking to directly extend the techniques in question as part of theoretical research. I read a lot of logic papers, because I build tools on top of logic-programming systems, and I find that out of an 8-page paper, there's usually only 1-2 pages of material relevant to me. There'll be 1-2 pages of introducing a new construct, motivating why the construct is useful, sketching how it would be implemented and how it relates to other ideas; and then 6-7 pages of proofs showing that their extensions have all the soundness and whatever properties you want them to have. When I'm reading, I read those 6-7 pages as a single sentence in my head---"and now we prove that it works"---making for a nice 75%+ compression ratio.

YuriNiyazov• 16 years ago

Do you ever feel like you are missing out on something by skipping the proofs?

thomas11• 16 years ago

Note that books appear more than once on that page, because they can be in multiple categories. That being said, it is entirely plausible that he has read them all in his career.

wooster• 16 years ago

A fair question.

There are duplicates (Witten and Frank's "Data Mining", which is excellent), and some of the books he lists as favorites I would say are utter garbage. Some of them are so bad, I don't see how anybody smart could have read them and concluded they were worth reading.

That said, as far as the idea of reading that many books, I don't see how it's out of line. I read a lot, but not nearly as much as a professional researcher such as Norvig would. I have several hundred CS textbooks I've either read or skimmed pretty thoroughly, and most of my favorite professors had many more which they'd read cover to cover.

jules• 16 years ago

Which books do you think are bad?

Tichy• 16 years ago

He wrote one of the most popular books on AI, so it would make sense that he read/digested a lot of books on the topic.

joubert• 16 years ago

do you watch TV?

jdrock• 16 years ago

It's all or mostly technical stuff. I guess he doesn't read Calvin & Hobbes or anything non-work-related?

wyclif• 16 years ago

It's a pity that most of these are limited preview. I usually save only "full view" books because that makes my GLibrary more useful to others.

bl4k2• 16 years ago

did anybody else let out a slight giggle when they scrolled down past 'Humor: no books in this bookshelf yet' ?

bdr• 16 years ago

We need a partial order on these for which should be read first.

mmaunder• 16 years ago

In the first pages of Constraint-based grammar formalisms:

mahmud• 16 years ago

What really stood out for you about a mathematical text being typeset in (La)TeX? Were you also surprised by the popularity of No.2 pencils in elementary schools?

Matt-Martin• 16 years ago

How did you search his library on Google Books? Is it possible? How did you find his user id?

ivenkys• 16 years ago

Inspirational stuff.

adulau• 16 years ago

It's always very interesting to see the library of other people and especially the one of Peter Norvig... You may find books you don't know or see relationship between topics that you underestimated at some points.

Maybe it would be very interesting to see the bookshelves from HN users? I don't know if a lot of HN users have a LibraryThing account but it's a nice way to see what you share (or not share) in your bookshelves with someone else.

There are already two groups (moderately active) :

http://www.librarything.com/groups/purelyprogrammers http://www.librarything.com/groups/computerscientists

An example of statistics or information that you can get out of it:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau/stats/library http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau (on the right side, "Members with your books")

lylejohnson2• 16 years ago

I've used my GoodReads (http://www.goodreads.com/) account in the past for this sort of thing. I didn't realize that there was such a selection of these "share what books you're reading" kinds of sites!

spacemanaki• 16 years ago

And there's even more... My personal favorite is http://readernaut.com/ just because the design is more modern and simple. Although it has the same problem I had with GoodReads: poor consolidation of editions of the same book, so you end up with so many duplicates. Compared to Wikipedia where there is only one page for "To Kill A Mockingbird" but many on GoodReads and Readernaut.

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

Which of these sites has the best support for data portability?

korch• 16 years ago

I had no idea Google even had a page for listing all of your books! Now if only there was a way to seamlessly import that data from Amazon that didn't involve hand coding a screen scraper script...

wazoox• 16 years ago

LinkedIn has one too... We really need some open platform to manage our identity online!

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

A lot of books on "agent technology". All I know about this topic is the popular press gave it a lot of attention a few years ago. Anyone care to give a thumbnail sketch on this topic?

EDIT: this is the best thumbnail I could quickly find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

Good recommendations. I have read about 20 books on his lists and have them in my library. The difference for me is that some of these were very difficult for me to work through!

Off topic, but: I am reading "Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce" right now and can strongly recommend it: it characterizes different types of problems that can be solved with map reduce, possible solutions, and tradeoffs for different approaches. Really a useful little book.

nhnifong• 16 years ago

Has anyone read Norvig's only listed SF book R.U.R?

msg• 16 years ago

It is the first work to use the word "robot". I think that was in Asimov's preface to some edition of "I Robot".

But no, I haven't read it.

dkarl• 16 years ago

It's a boring and poorly written play, of historical interest only.

newmediaclay• 16 years ago

Had never head of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Looks amazing. Just bought it.

isnoteasy• 16 years ago

There should be dense books with very high level in which you are suppose to know the fundamentals and it can explain the core at depth.

Peter Norvig's Library

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