Which old computer books are still worth reading?

Question

Possible Duplicates:
Are old editions of computer books worthwhile?
What are some of your oldest programming books that you still use?

I'm looking to pick up some older computer books, and I'm looking for recommendations.

I thought my oldest computer book was 1981 "Starting FORTH." I have that because it's become a bit of a collector's item. I would still recommend it.

But a bit more poking around revealed 1979 "More BASIC Computer Games." These are games plucked from Creating Computing Magazine. Amazingly, I'd recommend that, too. There are a lot of clever solutions to problems, solved with just a few lines of BASIC. (There's a lot of crap code, too.)

Are there any old computer books that you would recommend? What is your oldest computer book?

Answer 1

Mythical Man Month (34 or so years old)

Design Patterns (1994)

Most strictly algorithms textbooks will hold their age, assuming they were written in a language you can understand

Answer 2

The old books I did not throw away typically deal with data structures, stuff on certain technologies I typically throw away (and don't buy any anymore ... even though I'm a C# developer I don't own any C# books on paper ... using my Oreilly Safari subscription for such stuff.)

So Sedgewick (Alogrithms in C++ / Java) is a keeper for example ...

Oh and I can't manage to throw away the hacker's new dictionary, I just love old jargon too much. Did you mount a spare monkey today?

Answer 3

• The C Programming Language (2nd edition), by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, 1988.
• The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth, 1973.
• The Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks, 1975.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman, 1984.
• Many others—those are just the ones off the top of my head.

Answer 4

Old programming language books may not be too useful, however there are books in the direction of estimation and making programmers happy that I feel are well worth while;

Tom Demarco - Peopleware - originally from 1987 is a very good read.

Is one of my favorites.

Answer 5

Code Complete by Steve McConnell from 1993. Actually there is a 2nd edition available from 2004.

A timeless book with lots of good info.

Answer 6

The Psychology of Computer Programming, by Gerald (Jerry) Weinberg is nearly timeless, and is a great introduction to the idea that most technical problems are really people problems if you dig deep enough.

Since the pace of change in human beings is a lot slower than advances in hardware and software, reading this book will continue to pay off for a very long time.

I'd go for the second (Silver) edition for added material.

Answer 7

IBM 1130 FORTRAN Manual - can't say from what year, the front page was lost many a years ago :-) It's old, but I'm not sure why it would be worth reading nowadays.

Apart from that one, without naming the titles specifically:
- books dealing with cpu architecture (early processors, you'll probably grasp easily books from that time if you're just learning about it; after that take a newer book and so on ...)
- books dealing with computer architectures and "inner workings"
- algorithms - engineering mathematics (numerical methods, statistics, ...)

Books were better written 15-10 years ago ... I have a feeling that nowadays most of them are just copy pasted from other titles (same stuff over and over and over ...)