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by leibniz 5224 days ago
The mini-bio of Gerald Sussman on the right-hand side states that "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs .. is universally acknowledged as one of the top ten textbooks in computer science".

I'm curious why they explicitely speak about the top ten.

Which are the other 9?
1 comments
iso8859-1 5224 days ago
What would you want them to say? Top 100? Too modest. Top 3? Too cocky.
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leibniz 5223 days ago
This is a misunderstanding. You can read my question as "According to [..] the SICP is one of the top 10 CS books. Which, do you think, are those?"

I'm just interested because it seems SICP is THE book on programming, and I wonder: Which other CS books are that prominent? The only one I can think of, is "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig.

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microtherion 5223 days ago
This is probably going to devolve again into a long discussion, but here's the books with an academic bent that I was most impressed with (many of them 25 years ago, of course):

"Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman (a.k.a the "Dragon Book") "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation" by John E. Hopcroft and Jeffrey D. Ullman

An amazing book, despite the fact that the core thesis of the first edition, that we were on the verge of permanent world domination by RISC architectures, turned out to be dead wrong:

"Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson

Two books by Niklaus Wirth (A bit out of fashion, maybe because they were written in the "wrong" languages, and maybe because they were TOO concise in today's world of shovelware books. Wirth is the Strunk & White of CS writers):

"Algorithms and Data Structures" by Niklaus Wirth "Compiler Construction" by Niklaus Wirth

This book might be the one that impressed me most in my undergraduate studies, although I can't say I've done much with what I read there:

"Parallel Program Design: A Foundation" by K. Mani Chandy and Jayadev Misra

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