[Derbasti]

Without a doubt one of the best technical books I have ever read.

To me, it was a missing piece of the big puzzle of "how do computers work". I read many a book to answer this question, and came away with three books:

- CODE by Charles Petzold explains the CPU

- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau explain OSes

- Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom explains programming languages

Masterfully done.

[shanusmagnus]

These look great, and judging by other people's comments, are instances of a class of book I will poorly describe as "lovingly-crafted works of art on highly technical CS topics", a genre that I am always on the lookout for more examples of.

From my own experience, some examples might be:

- SICP, by Abelson and Sussman

- Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Norvig

By general acclaim, some examples might be:

- How to Design Programs, by Felleisen et al

- Beautiful Racket, by Butterick

- LISP In Small Pieces, by Queinnec

- The Art of Computer Programming, by Knuth

- The Elements of Computing Systems, by Nisan and Schocken

What else comes to mind? (My list is very LISPy, but that's just bc I have high awareness there.)

[thecatster]

It's not really CS, but alongside the books you have listed (I have most of those physically and as eBooks!) I absolutely adore "The Art of Electronics" as the Bible to electronics. It's definitely helped me out immensely.

[shanusmagnus]

That's a great example -- I know people who have that and feel a religious zeal for it. That "religious zeal about a technical / science created with art and care" book is the feeling I'm really after.

[thecatster]

Right, exactly: when that much care is put into a resource, I truly feel that I enjoy it more, even if the material itself might seem dry at first. Those kinds of feeling books are truly special.

[shanusmagnus]

100%, which reminds me: another example of books created with incredible care are anything by Douglas Hofstadter. The canonical example is Goedel, Escher, Bach; but one that I think is super under-rated is Le Ton beau de Marot -- not only does he care about the content, but the page layout, the font, everything. Truly a labor of love and obsession.

[zem]

"Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming", by Van Roy and Haridi

[hnxs]

FYI there is a second edition of CODE coming out at the end of August.

I will check out Three Easy Pieces! Thanks for the rec.

[password4321]

“Code” 2nd Edition

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31696901

[e19293001]

Could you please consider this book?

Compiler Construction Using Java, JavaCC, and Yacc[0]

In my opinion, this has been underrated book. I learned a lot from this book. I enjoyed it and plan to read it again.

If you could check it out. It contains solid explanation from theory to implementation. I'm not affiliated with the author, I just wanted to show I'm grateful for his work.

[0] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97811181127...

[vips7L]

OSTEP is the best technical book I’ve ever read.

[sydthrowaway]

Exercises are lacking.

[vips7L]

YMMV but I found them to be pretty complex and required some in depth knowledge of both assembly and C. Implementing threads/clone at the sys call level required knowing how to set up the stack and registers for the new process. If I recall correctly there was also a hard problem about virtual memory, but this was 3 years ago.

[Andrei2605]

Depends whether you have the international version or the north american one.

[jgwil2]

Could you elaborate on the differences?

[lalwanivikas]

Exactly the comment I was looking for. Thanks for the OS book recommendation.

PS: you might want to reformat your list.

[easterncalculus]

I have started reading Introduction to Computer Organization by Bob Plantz, and I think it would also tell someone a lot about how computers work. It starts with hardware and builds into Assembly and eventually higher level concepts like OOP.

[volkadav]

Similar vein re: CPU, targeted at an undergrad level, you might enjoy _Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective_ by Bryant and O'Hallaron (https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/) At least I found it a really well-written and integrative text coming from knowing C and wanting to learn the next level down well. Ties in with the OS bits on the "top side" too.

[sg47]

Any defining book for databases? I'm interested in going deeper into the query planner and indexes.

[runevault]

Look up Designing Data-Intensive Applications by O'Reilly.

[jsshah]

Database Internals by Alex Petrov

If you are into videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjbohkNBWQs_...

[skrtskrt]

Any defining book for networks?

[zvmaz]

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1, Richard Stevens.