Reading List

Almost as contentious (maybe more) than asking a programmer what their favorite editor/language is would be to ask them what the most important books are for a budding programmer to read. Every smart programmer I know has a small list of books that are essential (they claim) to know anything important about programming, software, etc.

Taking the union of all such books would yield a stack taller than you are. I'm doing my best to ferociously play catch-up.

I tend to read books 2 or 3 at a time: one is usually about a specific technology, one higher-level about programming/coding as a whole, and one usually more for fun (if I'm lucky, I get to read fiction! That normally happens most in the summer).

Because broadcasting life is more fun than living it, here's what I've been reading, and what's next in queue.

Read last year or so...

• The Little Schemer, by Friedman and Felleison


• The Seasoned Schemer, by Friedman and Felleison


• The Reasoned Schemer, by Friedman, Byrd, and Kiselyov


• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman.

These are what I've read since starting school, Fall 2009.

• The Pragmatic Programmer, by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (Finished October, 2009)


• The Little MLer, by Felleison and Friedman (Finished November 13, 2009)


• The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks (Finished November 13, 2009)


• Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel.


• The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie


• Purely Functional Data Structures, by Chris Okasaki

If you have any suggestions, let me know!

The list of books in my room that I haven't started yet (or aren't actively finishing up) is far larger, and I'll get to those next. Wish me luck!

New Blog

Hi all,

In a financial confusion (new cards invalidate old ones, internet companies), the former host of morepaul.com dropped me and my site after a single, spam-collected e-mail.

Thanks to Google Cache, I was able to recover most of my posts (though little of the uploaded content), and have switched to Blogger for now.

In many ways, the change is very good: like when I moved from LiveJournal to More Paul, I think it's time for a change in tone. In this iteration, I hope to include:

• Thoughts on Code: You wouldn't know it from my previous blog, but I think about code a lot. I'll hopefully include code snippets of puzzles I'm solving, projects I'm working on, etc.


• Thoughts on books, especially relating to code: Like any good programmer, I'm always reading. I hope to keep a list as to what's working for me and what isn't.

This hopefully won't come at the expense of my previous tone, which was "here's what I'm doing with my life right now." But like the author of this great A List Apart essay, no technical detail, no matter how arcane, will be as uninteresting as my previous blog if I care about it enough.

Besides: it's a blog. It's an invitation for vanity. So if I tell you how to manually curry functions in Scheme with macros, I will, dammit!

More later, let this just be a stopgap. In the meantime, welcome!

(for those who were wondering about the title, it's a reference to The Little Schemer, a most wonderful book for anyone (of any level) to learn to think about problems recursively. Near the end you explore some pretty hip theoretical topics, but you wouldn't know it if I hadn't told you ^_^).