Indeed an excellent book. It succeeds, as did Kee’s Scientific American column, in being both deep and lucid - a rare combination. This is accessible to the non-specialist who’s willing to make the effort because for the most part he picks areas that are profound but can be explained simply. Like the old “minutes to learn, years to master” ideal for games.
It’s also noteworthy that this stuff hasn’t dated - it’s a bit like Paul Graham’s explanation that the basics of Lisp hasn’t changed much in 50 years because Lisp is based on mathematics, not technology.
Good job getting this excellent book some new exposure. If you don’t know this stuff it’s truly mind-expanding. (And if you do know it the reminders won’t hurt…)
This is the kind of book I go through every few years, usually when I’m trying to learn what all the hubbub is about the hot new language. Usually the fundamentals don’t require learning a GUI library, and it seems every language has at least one GUI library. I don’t have a particular book, but I search the web for “programming contests”.
“But if aliens are not sending us messages, there is no way for Drake’s search program to discover this since there is no stopping rule. The hypothesis is non-falsifiable. At best, the SETI program amounts to only half an experiment.”
For shame. He should come to terms with the fact that the halting problem is unsolvable. Half an experiment cannot be done, but the other half need not remain undone. Let each turist halt when bored.
“In the end, Hungry Hollow is threatened by developers. How can it be saved by a native grave?”
I’ll give a shout-out for A.K. Dewdney any time! Him, Martin Gardner, and Douglas Hofstadter are three of the Popular Science authors I grew up on. A. K. Dewdney couldn’t write a boring book if he tried. Glad to see a new generation will be discovering him.
I am currently working on a book about Newport Forest, as well as a book on the ups downs of mathematical research. As a skeptic on the 9/11 terror attacks, I also contribute to one of the many investigative websites flourishing on the web these days: physics911.net/public
Matt - you should know how to do anything well enough to recognize whether another implementation is better or worse than you could do, probably, but I agree that beyond that it depends entirely on the maturity of your market. I know Jeff likes to work on cutting edge topics, where Do It Yourself may be the only reasonable option.
On the other hand, mental exercises aren’t any more pointless than mental games, regardless of how they apply to your work. There’s a whole spectrum of things you can do to interact with people, ranging from open-source work to founding a company, but you exercise different parts of your brain by learning and applying the mathematical side of CS. Not to mention that insight into the complex algorithms we use helps us to better understand when to use and when to avoid them, what problems they can and can’t solve.
A little rant about the usability of amazon for dutch users.
Click on the reccommendation/ amazon link.
I get a page from amazon.com.
Great, the book is available ($20).
Click on add to whishlist,login, and notice that is not my normal wishlist.
Go to amazon.nl, get redirected to amazon.co.uk , type in the title and find the book (20).
click add to whishlist, AHA , that’s my normal wishlist!
Go to google, type “20 in euro” and find out it would cost me 29 euro.
I have an account there so amazon knows i live in nl and want my prices in euro.
Big Free supersaving/mailing, Hell yea!,Oh? I’m not eligable because i live in nl,and postal costs are allso high from uk to nl.
[For the geograpically challenged I probably live like 100km away from th UK,and 20km from germany.]
Ahh forget it, forget amazon.de(germany) too,I’ll just go to bol.com, EUR 27,99,10% discount deliverd within 1 week (but most probably within 2 days).
And Actually was worse than that:
A few hours ago it was something like 19 + an obsecure 8 fee on amazon.co.uk.
A blogger i do respect and like to read uses an affiliate link to amazon.com.
Even if i ordered from amazon, the affiliate link is lost when changing to amazon.co.uk.
After that there are so many dumb UI and company bugs that i decide to forget about amazon.
Lozers:
*me: i get annoyed.
*Jeff:He lozes an affiliate link
*amazon: They deserve it.
Winners:
*bol.com
Funny, I wondered if this blog would spike the sails… I actually ordered my copy yesterday. I look forward to reading more, this is a great blog and I always welcome the suggestions.
This is a beautiful book - I’d forgotten that I’ve got a copy until this post. Absolutely one of the best. Unmatched, and alongside Programming Pearls just fantastic.
I was a little surprised for you to describe it as “little” because it isn’t that little - about 300 pages. But then I realized that now we have these damn tedious Wrox doorstops and boatanchors that take over 1000 pages to regugitate the man pages (or worse than that, an ambiguous and confusing plain lanugage walkthrough of the source code) but explain nothing.
We’ve lost a lot - the 70’s and 80’s had lots of great books - now we have very little.
The analogy to how “A good musician might still practice arpeggios” doesn’t quite fit. Performers need to keep up finger strength and dexterity, so they must (not might) do technical exercises. This is akin to professional athletes working out regularly.
The new Turing Omnibus opens your eyes to new worlds. Everything from genetic algorithms, to pushdown automata, to computer vision techniques are fair game. This book doesn’t go into enough depth in any topic to actually teach you how to do anything - but it will teach what is possible, and will help you recognize the best tool for the job. You won’t understand the details of simulated annealing or the simplex algorithm, but when you encounter a new problem you will know the right approach to take, and will having a jumping off point for your research.
