Hacker News Books

Thank you for pointing it out!

I started working on Dinosaur Island (http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php?puzzle_id=19) just to build that opportunity, actually.
It is kind of a "toy" example, though, so I was interested in hearing from people working on "real" applications.

> Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".

And of "To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure" and "Romeo And/Or Juliet", CYA retellings of Hamlet and R&J; and of "How To Invent Everything", a handy-dandy guide to bootstrapping modern technology if your time machine malfunctions.

AND he is the human of Noam Chompsky, a Very Good Boy.

I've learned/taught from the "dinosaur book" [1] and for the price tag it's pretty bad. It's a nice overview but it has several problems. First of all the section on CPU scheduling is pretty sparse and confusing. I skimmed through this book and it seems on par. But the one thing this book skips is Rate monotonic and Earliest deadline first - which I found to be rather difficult algorithms. This is because whenever you would research it - I would find other professors using screenshots from the dinosaur book that doesn't help explain it at all. I would be happy to give you my notes on it.

I really wish that was a an open source project that took developers and/or students from start to finish of an operating system. I should preface that and say that it should be easy to understand and use. I know about xv6 and I feel like that's too complex. I've found MikeOS [2] but I will have to study/extract it into pieces.

In any case - I really think this practice should be more widespread. Unfortunately, I've found many people to offer "lazy criticism" they point out something is wrong but don't want to offer any help to make it better. The Rooks Guide to C++ is a perfect example of this - yeah it's not perfect and doesn't contain all C++ knowledge you could ever know about (there have been a lot of negative criticism about the book). But that's not the point - it's designed for people who know nothing about programming to learn about C++ in a 16 week course. It's goal isn't to replace the Stroustrup expert C++ book.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Silb...

[2] http://mikeos.sourceforge.net/

I should point out that my academic background was political science and econometrics, with only a smattering of comp. sci courses in college, so I'm also an autodidact in computer science -- my recommendations come from my own experience.

You will want Knuth's TAOCP (especially since you mentioned you've had trouble with sorting and searching algorithms), but it's not something to start with. Likewise, Hopcroft and Ullman's "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation" is a crucial text, but it's highly abstract (much more so than Knuth, which is a very practical work) and very, very slow going. Pick it up later when you're comfortable with mathematical formalisms.

You'll want to, relatively early on, find a readable introduction to discrete mathematics (the mathematics of "countable" objects, like sets and integers) and some of the more useful optimization techniques like linear programming. I used Grimaldi's "Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics" to good effect.

Eventually, pick up some good textbooks on programming language design (not parsing and compilation), like Turbak et al's "Design Concepts in Programming Languages" and Finkel's "Advanced Programming Language Design."

Also, a few more sitting on my bookshelf that I also highly recommend -- "Computer Organization and Design," "Operating System Concepts" (the famous "Dinosaur book"), and (if you want to get into the nuts and volts of hardware), Horowitz's "Art of Electronics." Great works.

That should tide you over for the next few years -- but it'll be fun reading. Really!

Dinosaur (Noun): A person or thing that is outdated or has become obsolete because of failure to adapt to changing circumstances.

I'm not sure why you think I'm a "young'un" but, please get over yourself, "old timer."

So because 12px font was super readable on 640x480 CRT on Win95, we should continue to use that and never update our blogs?

Are you seriously trying to defend shitty readability in 2013? What a weirdo.

Dinosaur books for children in libraries across the country (public or school) are frequently quite old, or at least out of date.

Not terribly surprising when you consider it is a topic that sits on the very edge of human knowledge, but so often attracts the interests of children. Same problem exists for space books. When I was a kid I had a few space books that referred to men "one day" landing on the moon. This was 20 years after that had actually happened.