[agomez314]

It's nice to see the author spent a great deal of time and effort to share with others his learnings. However it's important to note his intention at writing this book: "I’ve chosen to focus on topics and concepts that I’ve encountered in my programming career – things that I know are important." Thus it's not an overview of Computer Science per se (which in my opinion is a fuzzy subject without clear boundaries) but subjects the author frequently encountered and perhaps heard as important things in the field.

I would also caution in how the book presents its chosen subjects as "Computer Science." Like the adage goes, "Computer Science is not so much about computers like petri dishes are about biology, or telescopes are about astronomy." There's so much beauty and variety in the field that it's really hard to just pin down in a curriculum. See "A Mathematician's Lament" [1]

I also challenge the notion that some of these subjects logically proceed from the other (some, not all).

I've got no problem with anyone reading the book, they'll be certainly much more informed about the field of computers in general. I especially appreciated the Further Reading sections to let the reader expand his learning. Thanks for sharing this post!

[1] https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

[bambataa]

At one point I had the idea to tag each section or paragraph with a topic ID and list the topic IDs directly referenced. Then you could build a graph with the referenced topics as edges. After refactoring it into a DAG, you could do a topological sort to get a linear sequence of topics And chop it into chapters.

I took that as an indication I was procrastinating, but I think it would be a fun way to structure a book!

[082349872349872]

compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34296702

Inspired by the title "Sketches of an Elephant", I wonder if practitioners might be interested in a CS book that would be the equivalent of Körner's "The Pleasures of Counting" ( https://books.google.ch/books?redir_esc=y&hl=de&id=wUdtVHBr-... ) which is structured more like a cookbook (inductive presentation) than a textbook (deductive presentation)?

lagniappe: http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

[Edit: come to think of it, what is HN but an institution that throws up a transect of species which may be found within the general —open— interval (CS theory, MBA case studies)?]