Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: What's your desert-island list of books for programmers? Peyton Jones: Well, you should definitely read Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. Speaking of pearls, Brian Hayes has a lovely chapter in this book Beautiful Code entitled, “Writing Programs for ‘The Book’” where I think by “The Book” he means a program that will have eternal beauty. You've got two points and a third point and you have to find which side of the line between the two points this third point is on. And several solutions don't work very well. But then there's a very simple solution that just does it right. Of course, Don Knuth's series, The Art of Computer Programming. I don't think it was ever anything I read straight through; it's not that kind of book. I certainly referred to it a lot at one stage. Chris Okasaki's book Purely Functional Data Structures. Fantastic. It's like Arthur Norman's course only spread out to a whole book. It's about how you can do queues and lookup tables and heaps without any side effects but with good complexity bounds. Really, really nice book. Everyone should read this. It's also quite short and accessible as well. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Abelson and Sussman. I loved that. And Compiling with Continuations, Andrew Appel's book about how to compile a functional program using continuation passing style. Also wonderful. Books that were important to me but I haven't read for a long time: A Discipline of Programming by Dijkstra. Dijkstra is very ...