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November 14, 2003
Bookshelf
Here's a trend I would like to start. A few folks have been challenging us with surveys of the best of this and the best of that. But I think it's more interesting to talk about all the stuff you actually keep on you shelves. I know my boy Benzon would need a year to get through his shelves, but they are extraordinarily well organized. As for me, half of my stuff is in the garage and I have yet to put together a decent meatworld library. But the spousal unit has allowed me to keep two good sized bookcases in the house. This is the top shelf of the one in the bedroom.
The DW book on the left side is from the guy who put together WalMart's data warehouse, widely acknowledged as the best in the world. The next one is an old text from my second year of CS. Steal the Network is a cool book that I got halfway through when I was still employed and on a Linux security kick this summer. After a month of unemployment it got too depressing to read.
Lies My Teacher Told Me. What's that doing there? I never read this book, but Lee told me that I had to have it. There are two Tannenbaum texts and my Springer Verlag instant for Pascal by Jensen & Wirth. I can't remember whether I used P-System or UCSD Pascal, but I do remember loving the language and hating the compiler. Damn thing never worked when I needed it to. I always thought I was cursed with the ability to find every bug in every system.
I got the Oxford Concise as soon as it came out. Can you remember all the excitement that surrounded the new version of the OED in 1990? Then there's my Prentice-Hall which I look at (but don't use) whenever somebody starts bloviating about George Eliot. The next book is the most precious on the shelf, if not in the whole library. This is Teach Yourself Swahili. My dad got it in '66 and we used to speak it around the house. Nothing unnerved my mother more than me ordering breakfast in swahili. Now I know abut four phrases and 20 words. Yike.
There's Irons in the Fire by McPhee. I'm a huge McPhee fan. What has he done lately? Edge City is a constant reference. Then there's Kurzweil's fantastic predictions about human-machine co-evolution and the Agent Smithian inevitability of it all. Next are several O'Reilly books. Perl, the new Regular Expressions and Learning ksh. It's difficult for me to believe how little programming I've done in the past four months. Finally are a Sams book for JSP that I started in the Summer of 2002 and quit because NT is just too damned inconsistent, and an Addison-Wesley on Java itself.
That was fun. What's on your shelf?
Posted by mbowen at November 14, 2003 11:24 AM
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� BOOKSHELF MEME from Begging To Differ
Cobb has a good idea, I think. Rather than making up "best" or "favorite" lists of books, it would be interesting to have people write about the books found in their bookshelves. This picture below shows a shelf in my... [Read More]
Tracked on November 15, 2003 09:36 PM