What Good Technical Books Adorn Your Library?

bluefoxlucid asks: "Lately I've been looking into technical books, and have come to the conclusion that there are a lot of useful books out there containing information that could be useful to me. To my alarm, I've found that many of these titles are not in my local public library! This requires action; I must build my own library, and actually use that bookshelf in my room! But, without a way to sample the books, how should I know which to buy? What (mainly non-fiction) recommendations would you make for anyone who would fall into the Slashdot audience to read?"

"Here I present a list of books I have and am looking into buying, with ISBN for each as well; in case anyone wants to know anything about a particular title, the objects I own are accompanied by a '*' while those on order stand next to a '#'. I haven't read all those I own; particularly, I skimmed Silence on the Wire and only read a chapter of Game Design: Secrets of the Sages. These range from

Hobby. These books have hobbyist value, giving tips for making useful things out of other less useful things. These range from ballistics to shoving a survival kit in a watch. Nothing on rail guns, gauss guns, sonic canons, particle accelerators, magnetic drive launchers, ionic wind engines, or any of the other nifty electromagnetic projects you can create; maybe in the future I'll find something.

• The Art of the Catapult (ISBN 1556525265)
• Backyard Ballistics (ISBN 1556523750)
• Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks (ISBN 0596003145)
• Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things (ISBN 0740738593)#
• Sneakier Uses for Everyday Things (ISBN 0740754963)#
• The Unofficial MacGyver How-to Handbook: Revised 2nd Edition (ISBN 1887641475)

Computers, Hacking, Security. These books give technical puzzles or information for programmers and security experts. These include an outdated Assembly book and a Game Design book, just because I had them and programmers and game designers may find use for this information. I should probably find a more up-to-date Assembly book that can be used with gas on Linux.

• 1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k (ISBN 0672327279)
• The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element Of Security (ISBN 076454280X)
• The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers (ISBN 0764569597)
• Assembler Inside and Out (ISBN 0078818427)*
• Game Design: Secrets of the Sages (ISBN 1575952572)*
• Hacker's Delight (ISBN 0201914654)
• Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (ISBN 1593270070)*
• Programming Challenges (ISBN 0387001638)
• Puzzles for Hackers (ISBN 1931769451)#
• Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering (ISBN 0764574817)
• Silence on the Wire (ISBN 1593270461)*

Mathematics. These books are mathematics related. Actually there's only one here, I was going to throw it in the above section and label it 'Technical' but the Psychology and Neuroscience stuff below is also 'Technical.'

• Statistics Hacks: Tips & Tools for Measuring the World and Beating the Odds (ISBN 0596101643)

Psychology and Neuroscience. These pieces are interesting because they explain the brain and learning, and how to use yours better. They may possibly have been more amusing if written by Q; the authors don't appear to want to remind you that you're primitive beings that can only expand your realm of thinking for fractions of a second at a time. Sadly, they were written by sane individuals and not alien beings who happen to be egomaniacs.

• Mind Hacks (ISBN 0596007795)#
• Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain (ISBN 0596101538)#

Humor and Nonsense. Funny stuff only a nerd could enjoy... but you know, if there's ever a Class 4 zombie invasion, you'll be ready. None of this stuff is useful, unless your brain is burning out and you need something to distract you while it relaxes and repairs itself; what better way than to read up on how to enter a burning building or choke a man with your bare thighs?

• The Action Hero's Handbook (ISBN 193168605X)
• The Action Heroine's Handbook (ISBN 1931686688)
• Prank University (ISBN 0307338436)
• The Superman Handbook (ISBN 1594741131)
• The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (ISBN 1400049628)*

That's it for my list. Surprised? Not only is it short but I actually own only a few of the items that have caught my eye! And yes, all of the humor is from ThinkGeek; that's where I found Hacking: The Art of Exploitation in the first place, which started all this. With the exception of Mind Hacks and The Zombie Survival Guide, none of the '*' and '#' items were found in a library search. I searched on some of the others as well, with no good results. Some of this stuff is in the Library of Congress; but a good number of the ones I searched for weren't.

This leaves my options for discovering new and interesting reads pretty limited—I can buy the books, or harass Slashdot and see if any of you actually have something useful. Rather than try to tailor your responses to me, just go wild; I'm sure anyone in any other technical field besides just programming would appreciate knowing about little gems they'll not find in a library anywhere."

Smells like desperation

[c0d3h4x0r]

Someone was asked to put together a Christmas list, weren't they?

No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

If more than 1% of the books you own, or more than one of the non-programming books you own, contains the word "hack" in the title, you're a pompous ninny. The one exception is for MIT people: anything prank-related doesn't count against the limit.

I was going to except Nethack players, also, but realized they don't deserve it.

Make magazine

[Noksagt]

The quarterly Make [makezine.com] magazine fits nicely with the other hobbyist books.

Amazon has subscriptions and back issues [amazon.com].

Safari

[wikinerd]

Get a Safari subscription.

Some favorites

[Scarblac]

Programming:

1. The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master: guide to being a professional software developer, covers a lot
2. Code Complete: how to craft a little bit of code; stuff like naming, indentation, etc. I read the 2nd edition which was great, the 3rd is reputed to be better.
3. Refactoring: giving a name to "improving existing code little by little", something we do every day; I found this a much more accessible first book to get into "High Church OO" than, say, Design Patterns.

Other:

1. Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: enthusiastic stories about scientific hubris
2. The Making of the Atomic Bomb: good history
3. The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems: got this as a birthday present, it's brilliant
4. Fiction by Neil Gaiman or Connie Willis
5. If you are into really far looking SF, fiction by Greg Egan
6. If you like unorthodox fantasy, fiction by China Mieville

Chess, why not:

1. The King, by Donner

Re:Who could forget...

[ignavusinfo]

there once was a time when i'd agree with "Anything from O'Reilly" -- nowadays their titles are hit or miss and aimed more at the mid to low tech market rather than in days of old. (and there are real gaps in their library. no really great LDAP books, for instance, and little in the realm of obj-c/cocoa, no updated mod_perl v2 book, little in the way of C, C++ and so on, but lots of annoyance books.)

but on a more upbeat note, along with K&R i'd have to nominate:

• graham's _on lisp_ no matter what language you hack in
• steele's cltl2 as an example of a really well written and highly readable reference,
• singh's _mac os x internals_, if only because it's such a fun read,
• bentley's _programming pearls_, maybe for sentimental reasons,
• friedman & felleisen's _the little lisper_ (now schemer), the book i recommend to non-programmers who want to understand what programming's like.

"Mainly non-fiction"

[Malfourmed]

The Dilbert Principle takes pride of place in the management & business section of my personal library; more true-to-life, and certainly more readable, than the Porter, Senge, Schwartz and Peters tracts gathering dust next to it.

Re:Knuth and K&R are old, tired and lame

[linguae]

The only worthwhile part of Knuth's work is the first book on sorting, and even then it is dry. Just because he can sling nasty formulas around when comparing algorithms doesn't mean a lot. These days we are using hardware that resemble DSPs and locality of reference problems can outweigh counting the number of multiplies by a long shot. Just learning O notation, what is an L2 cache miss and *to actually profile your code* instead of theorizing about it is much more important. His formulas aren't relevant on modern hardware.

The Art of Computer Programming is about algorithm analysis and development, not about computer architecture (caching) or software development (profiling). TAOCP, combined with Concrete Mathematics, the MIT algorithms book, and a good text on combinatorial algorithms should be more than enough to satisfy the needs of a computer scientist or seasoned software developer who needs all of the good algorithms that he or she can get. TAOCP isn't a book about all of computer science, but it isn't trying to be one either.

The K&R's C Programming Language is only useful to people who already know C. And C is such a small language that you shouldn't need a reference book once you know it. However, if you are a language geek and like that kind of thing, get the actual C standard and read it. Seriously, it isn't that big.

K&R is a useful book for C reference; in fact, I consider it as an explanation to the C standard. I refer to K&R, not necessarily the standard, for reference whenever I am stuck on a certain C concept. (Compiler construction is different; you should follow the standard to the letter). There is a reason why the K&R book hasn't been updated since 1989; other than C99 extensions, the book is a very good explanation of C as is. I learned C largely from this book (although, to be fair, I used an O'Reilly book to learn the basics of C before taking a class that used C. The professor in that class didn't assign a book, so I sought out the best book according to ratings: K&R. My book is worn out out of 2 years of use, but I love it).

Re:UPT from O'Reilly

[Scarblac]

The main reason is that +- 10 years ago, O'Reilly's books were great and Wrox and Sams were unknown (did they exist?). Nowadays, O'Reilly's lineup has been diluted by a long list of mediocre titles, and there are a lot of other good publishers of tech books.