Thursday, October 7, 2010

Reading is FUNdamental

I am currently reading three CS books. The differences in styles and approaches are striking, but they are all effective in teaching.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs aka SICP.
Classic text computer science and functional programming using Scheme as the implementation language. Used in 6.001 at MIT.
Related links:
Programming Collective Intelligence
Interesting algorithms for mining the huge datasets available in the web era. Uses python as the implementation language. Working through the first three chapters, the first thing I did was rewrite the examples in perl. Then I found I wasn't the only one to do so.
Modern Perl
chromatic has written a lovely book on Modern Perl, and shared the review copy for comments/editing. It was pretty sweet to email in some typos and receive a link back to an updated git repository with my changes applied.

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