Ask Slashdot: Books for a Comp Sci Graduate Student?

peetm (781139) writes "Having visited with me and my wife recently, the girlfriend of an ex-student of mine (now taking an M.Sc. in pure CS) asked me to suggest useful books for her boyfriend: '... He recently mentioned that he would love to have a home library, like the one you have, with variety of good, useful and must-have books from different authors. ... Mostly, I was thinking your advice would be priceless when it comes to computer science related books, but .. I would appreciate any sort of advice on books from you. ...' Whilst I could scan my own library for ideas, I doubt that I'm really that 'current' with what's good, or whether my favorites would be appropriate: I've not taught on the M.Sc. course for a while, and in some cases, and just given their price, I shouldn't really recommend such books that are just pet loves of mine — especially to someone who doesn't know whether they'd even be useful.

And, before you ask: YES, we do have a reading list, but given that he'll receive this as part of this course requirement anyway, I'd like to tease readers to suggest good reads around the periphery of the subject." I'll throw out Pierce's Types and Programming Languages (and probably Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages ), and Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures .

knuth's art of computer programming

[whyloginwhysubscribe]

I don't think knuth's 3 volumes have dated at all- they're still the definitive computer science tomes.

Um, shouldn't he already know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally, the highly respected works for each subarea of CS are already well known. Someone studying at the graduate level should have no difficulty finding them on their own, one would think.

Moreover, at the graduate level, one is generally studying for some specialization. Without knowing what specialization this person has chosen, any advice we could give him would be unlikely to be of use.

Classics

[DaveAtFraud]

Brooks - "The Mythical Man-month"
Yourdon - "Death March"
DeMarco & Lister - "Peopleware"

Of course he may change majors after reading them.

Cheers,
Dave

Design Patterns by the Gang Of Four

[mrflash818]

I recommend "Design Patterns" by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

Re:No they are not

[Anonymous Coward]

anything they might say has been said a thousand ways on the internet
By people who once had a couple conversations with someone who took a class loosely based on the book (who probably ought not be saying much on the subject to those trying to learn it for real).

Re:Computer Science

[ImprovOmega]

The brilliance of calculus is the usage of infinitely many infinitely small rectangular slices to nonetheless derive an exact measurement of the finite area under a curve. At its core, calculus is the merging of the infinite and the finite. When you truly understand it, it is one of the most elegant and beautiful discoveries in human history.