I second the recommendation for The Nature of Computation; very well written with interesting problems.

I would also recommend Higher Order Perl. I went through it this summer after a recommendation. I don't know Perl, and found it was more focused on practical functional programming techniques, and provides creative and interesting justification for its topics, which can be rewritten in other languages too. Great book.

If, for nothing else, Programmers At Work has Bill Gates talking about dumpster diving for program listings.

The book is great - I love how Gary (IIRC) describes the centrality of data structures and how code kind of emerges from there.

Code and Elements of Computing Systems are two of the most recommended books (top 20) on HN according to a now defunct scraping site.

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL21015000W/Elements_of_Comput...

Programmers at Work has a new edition, so might be easier to find now! https://www.programmersatwork.net/the-book

Agreed that Code is great! I'll pick up the second edition some day if I ever see it on a bookshelf.

Excellent. I was just looking for the title for Abrash's graphics book.

Another from the same publisher is

Assembly Language Magic: Programming for the 8088-80386 by William H. Murray

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2192212M/Assembly_language_m...

I really enjoyed my intro to RISC assembly:

SPARC Architecture, Assembly Language Programming, and C by Richard P. Paul

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9285324M/SPARC_Architecture_...

Any recommendations for VAX or 68k or 6502 assembly (or ARM)?

> Programmer's Guide to the EGA, VGA, and Super VGA Cards by Richard F. Ferraro

This one is really good.

Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden comes up a lot in these discussions. One of my favorites.

AKA K&R for Brian Kernighan & dmr.

Another regret was not getting my copy signed at a certain USENIX ATC.

..tho, actually Dennis was there with Ken and Rob, not Brian.

After reading the little schemer, I bought two more copies just to lend out to people. It's that good.

With continuation(s) in this follow up:

The Seasoned Schemer

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561006/the-seasoned-schemer/

What a weird book.

A dream of mine is to study some Scala at EPFL.

Likewise, (take/TA?) HtDP at UBC.

The intersection of these (illustrated-style ∩ Lisp) might be

Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!

by Conrad Barski

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16807102W/Land_of_Lisp

Though, I've seen some comments that some of the code isn't idiomatic or something; probably not a great book to learn Lisp from.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6905041-land-of-lisp

-- Not an easy book to get ahold of these days (like most of these)

for Haskell there is also,

The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia

by Paul Hudak

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8325694W/The_Haskell_School_...

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak/SOE/

and related,

The Haskell School of Music

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak/Papers/HSoM.pdf

The people who build all the solid, crucial parts of the infrastructure and tools that the vibe coders depend on. People who are pushing forward with new ideas. People who are building solid, snappy, delightful software. People who take joy in understanding the logic and creating solid, novel abstractions.

It is such a big category error to say "we're building simple apps without looking at code, therefore no one reads code anymore."

I'm not sure if this comment is meant as a little joke or observation, but I keep on seeing serious comments like this. It is serious anti-intellectualism to scoff at people reading programming books or understanding things.

Over the last few weeks, I've been eliciting a compiler for an experimental programming language called 5emel from Claude Opus 5.5. To give you the flavor, here's a randomly selected function from its compiler:

    # The table of the program's own functions, by their descriptors, which
    # the runtime searches for --memo-every and --memo-all.
    def function_data(:defs) =
      :rows = loop :next(:r = defs, :acc = []) (
        | [] = r; acc
        | [Def { :fname, _, _, _ }, ...:more] = r;
          next(more, [acc, "  .quad d_", fname, "\n"])
      );
      ["  .balign 8\n  .globl rt_functions, rt_nfunctions\n",
       "rt_nfunctions: .quad ", show(length(defs)), "\n",
       "rt_functions:\n", rows]

There's a lot of code in 5emel I haven't read; there's something like 15000 lines of TypeScript and JavaScript and 3000 lines of C. I've read almost none of any of that. I haven't even read all of the compiler, which is only about 1600 lines of code.

Despite that, I think I've been putting my extensive past reading of programming books to pretty good use in this process. 5emel is directed at finding a workable, though not optimal, general solution to one of the famously most difficult problems in computer science, and if it is successful, I think it'll be a real advance — and one that LLM coders can use as well as human coders. Better, maybe.

Maybe, six months from now, AIs will be good enough to devise better programming languages on their own so they can program things more easily. They don't seem to be able to do that right now, though, so my skillset doesn't seem completely obsolete yet.

However, I play go recreationally, even though AlphaGo already plays go better than any human ever could, and possibly better than any human ever will. Often go players consult KataGo or a similar AI to improve their game. So I anticipate that, even if my programming skillset is completely surpassed by AIs, I'll probably still enjoy doing things like 5emel (if I have the chance), just like I enjoy playing Minetest and walking around my neighborhood at sunset.

By the way, there's probably enough information in the above snippet to recreate all of the important parts of 5emel. I fed it to an Incognito Claude session and asked it to explain it, and it explained basically all of the significant aspects of the language, although it wasn't sure about some of them. You could probably elicit the rest of the compiler and runtime system from it, although you'll probably have to fight your way through a lot of the same problems I have.

Also, this guy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1amon8p/d...

I still think the return-on-time from a good book is greater than a lecture or video or discussion. There is just so much refinement and information density, plus the ability to skip around to find interesting content is hard to match. (there is also something to be said for reinforcement of memory via spatial awareness while reading a physical book that is lost on a screen).

An interactive portal to a digital book could rival or surpass the experience, but I haven't encountered that yet.

I was able to get my local college to buy a copy, but I have yet to read it all the way through.

Another I got them to purchase is

Exercises in Programming Style

by Cristina Videira Lopes

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20754451W/Exercises_in_Progr...

^ another book I enjoyed very much. Underrated.

SDF is CC Attribution-ShareAlike. I like reading the epub available at IA:

https://archive.org/details/software-design-for-flexibility_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#BY-SA

My impression was the opinions on SDF aren't divided so much as most of the scant reviewers were unprepared to grok this book. As much as people like to cite SICP, "Advanced SICP" flew totally under the radar.

with a 2nd edition released this year:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...

and another memorable book with Martin Kleppmann:

Secret Colors: A Gentle Introduction to Cryptography

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL29241370W/Secret_Colors