Monday, March 26, 2012

Here There Be (Complexly Desgined) Dragons

Today I saw a tweet to a blog post: Books Programmers Don't Really Read.

The post itself is from 2008, but I found it quite coincidental that I saw it tweeted today for two reasons:

  1. I own a copy of CLRS Introduction to Algorithms as UofT did indeed use it as the textbook. The post is quite correct that I've haven't read "more than a few selected chapters." The coincidence comes from the fact that I was actually reorganizing my book shelf the other night and pulled this one out thinking, "I should actually go through this book sometime soon."
  2. The second coincidence for me was that just last night I was talking to my dad about the Dragon Book. We were discussing interviews and he was telling me about his last one (over 15 years ago) for his current compiler job (working on the optimizer specifically). During his interview was asked if he was familiar with the Green Dragon Book and he responded that he was, and though he had never read it, he owned a copy of the Red Dragon Book and had read it several times (and he actually had).
Anyway, long story short: Good blog post on programming books which I found very coincidental for me as I just randomly interacted with two of them less than 24 hours prior.