五本值得记住的编程书籍

It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.

I've read the classics--Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming--but I'd like to highlight some of the more esoteric books which affected my thinking.

Zen of Assembly Language

Michael Abrash, 1990

I spent much of the 1980s writing 8-bit computer games (which you can read about if you like). Odd as it may seem in retrospect, considering the relative power of an 8-bit 6502 running at sub 2 MHz, I wasn't obsessed with optimizing for performance. If anything, I wanted the code to be small, a side effect of using a line-based editor and writing programs that someone would have to painstakingly type in from a magazine listing. Pages of DATA 0AFF6CA900004021... ugh.

Right when that period of my life came to a close, along came Zen of Assembly Language, by an author I had never heard of, which dissected, explained, and extended the self-taught tricks from my years as a lone assembly hacker. Even though Abrash was focused on the 8086 and not the 6502, it felt like the book was written personally to me.

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, yet it was published when the 80486 was showing up in high-end desktop PCs.

Scientific Forth

Julian Noble, 1992

Fractals, Visualization, and J

Clifford Reiter, 2000

These two books are about entirely different subjects. One is about pure scientific computation. The other is about generating images. Each uses a different, wildly non-mainstream language for the included code.

And yet these two books follow the same general approach, one I wish were more commonly used. Superficially, the authors have written introductions to particular programming languages (which is why the language name is in the title). But in reality it's more that each author has an area of deep expertise and has found a language that enables experimenting with and writing code to solve problems in that field. As such, there aren't forced examples and toy problems, but serious, non-trivial programs that show a language in actual use. Dr. Noble demonstrates how he uses Forth for hardcore matrix work and, when he realizes that RPN notation isn't ideal in all circumstances, develops a translator from infix expressions to Forth. Clifford Reiter jumps into image processing algorithms, plus veers into lighter weight diversions with titles like "R/S Analysis, the Hurst Exponent, and Sunspots."

Both books are wonderful alternatives to the usual "Learning Programing Language of the Month" texts. Sadly, Julian Noble died in 2007.