Comment by wduquette

10 months ago

Crafting Interpreters is the right at the top of my list of favorite programming books…and I’ve been reading them since the late 70’s. Amazingly clear and well-designed.

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wduquette

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__rito__  10 months ago

May I get the list of your favorite programming books?

  • wduquette  9 months ago

    Heh. The books on the list would be the ones from which I learned new ways to think about programming. Most of them are now long out-of-date, as witness the discussion on "101 BASIC Games" going on elsewhere on Hacker News.

    "101 Basic Games", edited by David Ahl and published by DEC. I learned to program by typing in the code from this book back in the late '70's.

    "Write Your Own Programming Language Using C++", by Norman E. Smith. This is about writing a simple Forth interpreter. I used what I learned to write a simple Forth interpreter in C, which I then used as an embedded extension language in a couple of apps I was working on at the time. This was on a VAX, and rather before I'd ever heard of anything like TCL/TK.

    "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit", by John Ousterhout, which (among other things) explained how an embedded extension language ought to work.

    The O'Reilly X Windows books, and various O'Reilly books with animals on the cover. They were essential references, back in the day.

    "The C++ FAQs", by I don't remember who. I never used C++ much; but this book was an excellent introduction to all of the pitfalls in the C++ of the day, and how to use C++ without shooting yourself in the foot--and an even better example of how to write for programmers. It was a big influence on how I later wrote programmer's documentation.

    "Refactoring", by Martin Fowler. I've never followed the advice in this book slavishly, but it's tremendously affirming to read a new book encouraging you to do what you were doing already without having a name for it.

    "Effective Java", by Joshua Bloch, which I spent a lot of time with about ten years ago; it helped me come to grips with Java and avoid a variety of foot-guns, much like "The C++ FAQs".

    Various Lisp books; I don't like Lisp all that much, or Scheme either; but I come back to one or the other every few years and take another look, because I always learn something.

    Various other texts on specific programming languages, as I experiment with them; "Learn You a Haskell for a Great Good" sticks out mostly because it has a memorable title.

    And "Crafting Interpreters", which I've worked all the way through and then run with. Last month I implemented a simple Datalog implementation in a few days using the techniques from CI; I'll soon be integrating it into a much enhanced version of Nystrom's Lox.