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yarou

I still swear by SICP and TAOCP for anyone who wants to learn CS seriously.

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For working as a professional programmer, SICP, sure. But TAOCP? Why?

I wrote that for anyone interested in learning CS seriously, I swear by those two books.

I would recommend an entirely different set of books for someone who wants to work as a professional programmer.

That being said, TAOCP really gave me a clear understanding of algorithmic analysis. It's a hard book, but after you finish it, you won't look at programming the same way again. Especially when it comes to design decisions for systems where efficiency is a must.

So, did you read the backflap and sent the email to Bill Gates as he suggested ;).. jk.. jk

How do you about working with such a hefty tome. I only use it a (light)reference. Any tips on how you went about it?

I got up early everyday and read a chapter before work and tried many of the exercises. Now I use the whole set as an almost daily reference where I work. The prelim math you can get from MITs 6.042 either on OCW or the reg school site https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring16/class-material.... if you just want to understand on an applied level what's going on. I did it in MMIX using the book 'The MMMIX Supplement' by Ruckert to check answers.

Re: SICP I noticed Harvard and other schools typically have an intro to CS course then a course after in abstraction using OCaml or other functional language. The syllabuses I've found for these second semester CS intro courses looks almost identical to SICP ToC except no hand rolled compiler which is probably the single most useful chapter I've ever read in any CS book.

One reason I went with different algoritm books is that they were for languages I use. Did the use of a fake ISA hamper your understanding at any point?

I think it works for the same reason _A Modern Method for Guitar_ works.. by not using a familiar context (tunes/languages), you have another vantage point to help internalize the lesson.

That could be. Someone redoing Knuth's stuff with his lessons and modern asm/HLL might create an interesting effect.

Just curious, what is your definition of "finish"? Read it cover-to-cover? Solve all the problems?

What books would you recommend for someone who wants to be a professional programmer?

Thanks for clarifying! Please post a list of books you will recommend for professional programmers.

TAOCP is also great because the implementations are in assembly language, which encourages you to think about efficiency in terms of the operations your machine performs, not statements in some high-level language. Not only is the writing excellent, but it is clearly written by a programmer with much practical experience, unlike some other algorithm texts. I deeply wish there were more modern books in the same style, with the same spanning focus of high and low level concerns.

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