The first bookclub selection was chosen at the July ChiPy meeting: it's Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, and you'll find further information about it at BookClubBook1. There's a mailing list for discussion amongst readers.
The remainder of this page is left intact, but it's obsolete. I expect we'll be reconsidering some of the titles in the future.
We're thinking of starting up a book club for reading relevant titles as a group. Benefits include:
- different perspectives on the material
- a little peer pressure to keep you going when life gets busy
- guaranteed conversation for after meeting trips to the pub
Please enter ideas for the inaugural round slotted to begin no later than July 1. Add whatever you like, doesn't have to be python, or even computer related ... but it'll be voted on the email list.
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
- Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (interview with Norvig of google)
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late
- Literate Programming
- Moneyball Yeah, it's about baseball statistics.
- Concurrent Programming in Erlang (Candygram brings some of these ideas to Python, but it would be nice to understand where they came from, in their native context)
- A New Kind Of Science
- The Art Of Computer Programming
- Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture
- Haskel: The Craft of Functional Programming
- Programming in Objective C
If you are interested please slap your name in here:
- Ed Summers
- Ian Bicking
- Chris McAvoy
- John Melesky
- Martin Maney (not interested in the AI title)
- Jason Gessner
- Eric Sinclair (interested in simpler stuff, sadly)
- Michael Tobis
- Peter Harkins (any but ANKOS, kooks are boring)
- Rohit Sankaran
- Skip Montanaro
- Chad Harrington
This is an interesting/related list on Amazon: Great Career Limiting Books, or How To Annoy Your Colleagues
mm: that's an interesting list. I'm especially struck by the way his very brief summaries focus on the particular paradigm each book/language left as its particular tidal mark on his programming mind. It leads right into something that I don't particularly care for about a couple of the books: they reflect this one right way to program meta-paradigm, which I think is absolutely and completely wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And that's why I was so struck by the (very) little of Concepts, Techniques, and Models that I had read (haven't had a back tuit available yet). It not only covers multiple paradigms, from that introductory passage I quoted on the list you can see that the authors are trying to explain the elephant of programming far more completely than the blind man who says it's about objects, or the one who sees nothing but functions, or etc. Which I've added to the list - seems the PDF draft hasn't vanished from the net after all (thanks, Google!).
ianb: who cares if it's a one right way if you aren't going to be brainwashed by it? Personally, I'd like to spend a little time working on something thoroughly impractical. Or, at least, divorced from my day job. Something that changes the way I look at programming, not something that reinforces my current perspective. A book or environment that takes one idea as far as it can is a good way to get that.
But anyway, the only book on our list that's like this is the Erlang book. SICP is multi-paradigm; it uses functional programming ideas as its foundation, but it doesn't stop there (and Scheme is not a very pure language as functional languages go).