Ask Yc: What is a Good Book to Read Before Learning a Programming Language?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=302497

by mannylee1 • 18 years ago

5 14 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have dabbled in server side Programming Languages here and there, but I would now like to thoroughly learn a new language. Before I do that,what would be a good book to read?

davidw2• 18 years ago

Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

bdfh422• 18 years ago

A great book for a good read - thoroughly recommended on principal but I think this specific request calls for something a bit more fundamental to the task of acquiring that programming language.

davidw2• 18 years ago

Well, if the 'specific request' had been in any way shape or form 'specific', maybe. It wasn't, so I recommended something that's a great hacker book in any case:-)

bitdiddle• 18 years ago

I just plowed through the first 113 pages of "Anathem", a great read so far. I think this is a good book to read before programming to understand the downsides to the "syntactic" machines.

I hope this helps

bdfh422• 18 years ago

spend $12 at Amazon on a copy of Charles Petzold's book, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.

It will all begin to make sense as you will have a thorough understanding of what is going on at the lowest level. You will never regret acquiring that knowledge.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

You need to tell us which language you want to learn. Otherwise it's like saying "I want to learn sports" -- amateur curling and professional football are very different sports. Windows programmers, Mac/iPhone programmers, server-side programmers, Javascript programmers, enterprise Java programmers, and Linux kernel hackers need to focus on different things.

In the absence of details, all we can recommend is basic mental conditioning for programmers. A standard piece of advice is "SICP". Another is "K&R". Eric Raymond's essay on "How to Become a Hacker" is a little dated and a little opinionated, but worth reading. "Learn emacs" (or, to be fair to vi and Textmate, "learn a decent text editor") is a piece of advice that I'm glad I followed.

You cannot go wrong by learning the basics of databases and web application architecture. The architecture of web apps is more important than the choice of server-side language. If it weren't so dated I'd recommend Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. For a more up-to-date version of that, you might try the required texts for this MIT course: http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web

mannylee1• 18 years ago

I would like to learn Erlang, but am looking for a general Computer Science/Programming book. A book that will explain some of the fundamentals behind computer programming no matter what the language.

petervidani2• 18 years ago

It's essential that you complete Isaac Asimov's I, Robot for a thorough understanding of how badly things can get out of control.

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

I think maybe you've just seen the movie, and been misled into thinking you know what Asimov's robot stories were about. I, Robot the book, has no bad consequences (likewise almost all of the other Robot novels...excepting the bit with the mind-reading robot and the 0th law leading to interesting results for planet earth...but it was still all for the good of mankind). The robots were all basically the good guys.

petervidani2• 18 years ago

oh yeah I forgot about the part where there was absolutely no conflict in any of the novels

parenthesis• 18 years ago

Read http://norvig.com/21-days.html .

dpapathanasiou• 18 years ago

Try "The Practice of Programming" by Kernighan & Pike (you can download it here: http://truly-free.org/e/n/Kernighan,%20B.W.%20&%20Pike,%...).

eries• 18 years ago

Design Patterns

Ask Yc: What is a Good Book to Read Before Learning a Programming Language?

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