Comment by PheonixPharts
12 days ago
"Don't cast your pearls before swine".
When I was younger I used to passionately defend those things I've seen as beautiful, but after years experience talking with people passionate about their fields and learning and those who never will be: If you lack the innate curiosity to explore those things others have declared marvelous, then this book will offer you no value.
Every time I crack this book open I get excited and I've read it multiple time and one most of the exercises. I can think of few other books that really expose the beauty and simultaneously strong engineering foundations of software.
You have "tons of experience programming" and sound like you've already decided you know what needs to be known (otherwise why even ask rather than just read it free online), I doubt this will offer you anything you haven't already seen before.
> If you lack the innate curiosity to explore those things others have declared marvelous, then this book will offer you no value.
> Every time I crack this book open I get excited and I've read it multiple time and one most of the exercises. I can think of few other books that really expose the beauty and simultaneously strong engineering foundations of software.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667825 and others)
> Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.
I recommend (not ironically) Double Binded Sax by the group named Software.
> I recommend (not ironically) Double Binded Sax by the group named Software.
After you finish that, I recommend queuing up Friedrich Nietzsche by Klaus Schulze.
> otherwise why even ask rather than just read it free online
Not GP, but my time is limited, so asking "is this something an experienced programmer would find worthwhile and insightful" is a fair question.
To be honest I'd recommend just taking a look. It's been 10 years since I first encountered the book (and programming) and I'm sure the lessons can be found elsewhere.
But I find the book a marvel of pedagogy and rank it as maybe one of the greatest textbooks of all time across disciplines. The lessons are packed so densely yet so concisely that you'll appreciate different things on successive reads.
If you're experienced it will also read very easily and quickly so it then becomes quite an easy and enjoyable skim and then you don't have to rely on other people's accounts of whether it is or isn't worth your time.
Might find it beautiful, but I'm also just f'in busy. Why do you think that if I enjoyed it I would've already done it? Enjoying things is great but it's not my main desideratum for doing something
Then it's not for you and you can do something else, like commenting about why you should read it.
| I can think of few other books I’m interested to know which books …