Books from Joe's blog

Some books that I really enjoy(ed)

It's been quite some time since I blogged about what I've been reading.  That's not because I haven't been reading -- au contraire! -- but rather because I've been busy doing so.  I find these posts interesting for myself, so that I can look back and see where my interests were at a particular point in time.  Given the sheer number of additions, I can't properly rate them like I have in the past. Here are the more interesting ones, those that stick out in my mind:

Music

• Theory of Harmony, Arnold Schoenberg. 1922.

• Psychology of Music, Carl E. Seashore. 1938.

• Study of Counterpoint, John J. Fux. 1965.

• The Study of Fugue, Alfred Mann. 1987.

• Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century, Knud Jeppessen. 1992.

• Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff. 2001.

• Guitar Man: A Six-String Oddyssey, or, You Love that Guitar More than You Love Me, Will Hodgkinson. 2006.

• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks. 2008.

Mathematics

• Euclid's Elements (Books 1 - 13). 300 BC.

• The Principia : Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton and Andrew Motte.  1846.

• Introduction to Mathematical Logic, Alonzo Church.  1944.

• Foundations of Algebraic Topology, Samuel Eilenberg and Norman Steenrod.  1952.

• Foundations of Mathematical Logic, Haskell B. Curry.  1963.

• Diophantus Of Alexandria -A Study In The History Of Greek Algebra, Sir Thomas L. Heath.  1964.

• From Zero to Infinity: What Makes Numbers Interesting, Constance Reid.  1964.

• Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math, Joseph Mazur.  2006.

• Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, John Derbyshire.  2007.

• God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History, Stephen Hawking.  2007.

• Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (Modern Library Chronicles), David Berlinski.  2008.

Computers

• LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual, John McCarthy. 1962.

• Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Marvin Lee Minsky. 1967.

• The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling (Volume I: Parsing), Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman. 1972.

• The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling (Volume II: Compiling), Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman. 1973.

• Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, Niklaus Wirth 1976.

• A Discipline of Programming, Edsger W. Dijkstra. 1976.

• Architecture of Concurrent Programs, Per Brinch Hansen. 1977.

• The Elements of Programming Style, Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger. 1978.

• Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert. 1980.

• Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective, Edsger W. Dijkstra. 1982.

• CLU: Reference Manual (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), B. Liskov, et al. 1983.

• Algorithms and Data Structures, Niklaus Wirth.  1985.

• Communicating Sequential Processes, C. A. R. Hoare. 1985.

• The Little LISPer, Third Edition, Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. 1989.

• Common LISP, The Language, Second Edition, Guy Steele. 1990.

• The High Performance FORTRAN Handbook, Charles H. Koelbel, et. Al. 1993.

• 201 Principles of Software Development, Alan M. Davis. 1995.

• Algol-like Languages (Progress in Theoretical Computer Science), Peter O'Hearn and Robert Tennent.  1996.

Based on this list, you might surmise that I read a lot.  ;)  In fact, I typically have between 3 and 5 books going simultaneously (how parallel of me), so I use the term "read" somewhat nontraditionally.  I prefer to absorb the information by immersing myself in many books in the same genre simultaneously, instead of committing to a single one.  This seems to be effective, but is also slightly odd and perhaps quite esoteric to other people; the result is that every room in my home is littered with books each in some possibly long-forgotten state of being "read" (along with tattered academic papers, language manuals, etc).  I like it, but some people believe this is an indication that I'm a tad insane. C'est la vie.