Some programming resource reviews

Since I've been teaching myself, and especially since I've been flirting with several different sources rather than settling into a steady relationship with any particular one, I thought I'd share my impressions.

So you know where I'm coming from: I took AP Computer Science AB (Java) in junior year of high school. Then in senior year we had a semi-experimental Scheme class based on the classic SICP (see below), but nowhere near as hardcore. Because Java and Scheme are so different, and because I forgot a lot of Java over the intervening summer, this amounted to me learning to program two separate times with very little cross-contamination.

After that, I didn't write so much as a line of code for my whole first year at MIT. (Yeah, I know -- how could I?!?, etc.) But somehow a lot of vague programming ideas seem to have stuck in my brain, making it much easier to (1) learn a new language, and (2) re-learn programming in general. So I'm somewhere between 'rank beginner' and 'person who wants to pick up a second language after their first CS class'. This will affect my assessment of resources.

>> Learning Python, Mark Lutz & David Ascher

...Comprehensive, I suppose. It's the O'Reilly book, which gives it lots of reputation points. It goes into a lot of detail about basically everything (I'm reading it online, but the dead-tree edition is quite hefty). Tables of built-in integer and string functions, that sort of thing. Even -- get this -- more than one chapter on getting Python to run on your system, choice of IDE, and how to run programs you write from a variety of situations. This makes it surprisingly useful as a reference, for a book with the word "Learning" in its title.

The thing that bothers me about this book is that it can't seem to decide where it's aiming. It's definitely a programming book, not a computer science book; but it's in between "dense comprehensive tutorial/reference for people who already know what they're doing" and "learn programming from scratch using Python". For example, it explains the ideas of iteration and recursion, gives very basic examples, and discusses the general sort of situation in which you might want to use them -- and then a minute later it hits you with a lot of jargon and dense stuff. Curious approach.

Perhaps some of the confusion is because the authors are trying to take a "quick survey first, then dig into the details" approach on each section, and their definition of "section" is too short, leading to a confusing rapid alternation between the high view and the details.

I'm only up to the section on classes and OOP so far, because I've started to run into stuff I never learned or have forgotten; so I can't comment on the GUI section or anything like that, but I'm sure everything else is quite comprehensive.

>> Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson & Sussman

Ahh, the classics. Especially the classics that are available online, for free, in full, under Creative Commons, and not in a really irritating interface!

This is a hardcore nerdy book. It doesn't teach you computer science, it ties you down and throws computer science at you thick and fast, but in a totally awesome, non-evil way. It's really not a programming book, either -- the authors go out of their way to teach you the absolute bare minimum of Scheme syntax to handle the concepts they're presenting. This is kind of irritating if your goal is to be able to do practical things quickly (ha). But if your goal is to achieve nirvana, you could do a lot worse than this book.

Read the footnotes. They are snarky, and competently so, unlike the lame attempts at humor you see in most textbooks.

>> Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days, Dorai Sitaram

This is a straight-up no-frills tutorial for people who already know how to program, more or less. Reading this after having taken a SICP class was pretty interesting: I kept going "Hey! That piece of syntax makes it really easy to do X thing we were always beating our heads over in class, because SICP HATES SYNTAX OR SOMETHING." Hooray for actually doing things with Scheme. I'd gotten the (not entirely wrong) impression that Scheme was good for nothing but theoretical interest and formalism with a dash of AI.

I'm not sure whether to recommend reading this along with SICP. On the one hand, I tried it and got really confused. Part of the charm of SICP's syntax starvation is that it actually helps you figure out how to do things; they simply refrain from teaching you the four other ways to do it. On the other hand, Scheme can actually do stuff that's not all abstract and theoretical and weird, and this teaches you how to do that.

>> [pdf] How To Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning with Python, Downey, Elkner, and Myers.

This, I think, would be a good book for a (dedicated) beginner. It starts right at the beginning with the very fundamentals, and keeps a great balance between new concepts and new syntax. I haven't gotten very far at all in this book, mostly because I've spent so much time on the O'Reilly Learning Python book, but I like it very much so far.

Plus, how can you say no to a book that's written in LaTeX? Seriously, now.

>> Project Euler

Oddly enough, none of the above books have enough exercises in them. Teach Yourself Scheme has none at all. Learning Python only has a few, once every five chapters or so, and they're all about catching tiny nitpicks that trip you up. SICP has plenty but they're geared toward teaching CS principles, not coding practice. How To Think Like A Computer Scientist has good ones but not many of them. I googled around but the only thing I found that wasn't too advanced was FizzBuzz, which wasn't enough.

Enter Project Euler. It's a site full of math puzzles, varying in difficulty from "ludicrously easy" to "frackin' impossible", and set up such that you basically have to solve them by programming. Things like "find the ten-thousandth prime number", too big to be solved by hand. Excellent!

The site is obviously run by people who know what they're doing -- all the problems are very unambiguously stated, with examples, and the site keeps your score for you. Once you've solved a problem, you can look at the discussion thread where other people post their code and discuss alternative methods. The other people, by the way, are brilliant, and come up with all these elegant methods and neat optimizations for you to imitate.

It was the Summer of the Library Books. San Mateo County glowed red...

[The title is an allusion to the pseudo-medieval text on the cover of one of the Redwall books: "It was the Summer of the Late Rose. Mossflower Country shimmered...]

"A red sun rises. Ash has been spilled this night." -- all right, that was worse. I couldn't resist making another allusion, though. All the wildfires in Northern California have been sending so much smoke into the air that, many days, the sky has been silvered over and the sun has turned red long before setting. (I don't remember exactly how long before setting, but the sun's been red while still five or more diameters above the horizon.) It's actually a beautiful sight, for all it's a symptom of fire and destruction elsewhere, and for all the smoke is causing trouble for people with asthma (especially in cities closer to the actual fires).

Other than that, though, mostly the weather has been fantastic. There have only been two days so far that I'd call "uncomfortably hot". Take that, friends back in Boston. It doesn't even matter that my house doesn't have air conditioning! I don't need it!

For the first time in four years, I'm not doing any kind of science research internship thing over the summer. This is mostly because I was too lazy to get myself a lab job, although it's lovely to have all this spare time. And since I have almost nothing but spare time, I've been lavishing attention on my book heap. I've taken an inordinate amount of books out of the library, bought a few from Barnes & Noble, and pulled several out of my family's rather large collection. I even have time to reread books! What a luxury.

(Because I've started to get a little tired of just reading, I'm also teaching myself Scheme in fixnum days.)

Here are some lists of books, with comments. I may write up more details on some of the sciency ones.
(Lists are not in any kind of order, and are not exhaustive (I'll probably remember more and add them later).)

Finished

• The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien. This is a lot more fun than I remember it being when I read it as a kid. Tolkien's prose style is maybe a little difficult for kids -- but this time around I kept wanting to grab a bunch of random kids and read aloud the fun parts, really perform them. On a totally unrelated note, it's also fun to reread The Hobbit after knowing Lord of the Rings; Tolkien is constantly hinting at things. For example, it makes so much more sense that the Necromancer could cause Mirkwood to be nasty and gross if you know that the Necromancer is actually Sauron. And, there are the Dwarves charging into battle yelling "Moria!".


• This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin. This one had me itching to make funny waveforms to screw around with my auditory perception, and to listen to the pieces of music he mentions with a totally different ear. Unfortunately, I was stuck on an airplane. Quite a ride. I took note of several small things Levitin said about his approach to his area of research, and am planning to write them up.


• When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech For Better And/Or Worse. Ben Yagoda. This one's good for dipping into because each of the chapters (Adjective, Adverb, Article, Conjunction, Interjection, Noun, Preposition, Pronoun, Verb) is relatively short and stands alone. Yagoda writes as a serious linguist, but not a dry one: he clearly enjoys language for its own sake, as any geek ought to. This is not a writing-advice or prescriptivist book (although it does contain some tidbits of writing advice).


• How To Dunk a Donut: The Science of Everyday Life, Len Fisher. This is an interesting popular-science book. Rather than describing one small area for the public, Fisher describes applying a "scientific" approach to random topics like "Why do cookies crumble when you dunk them in milk?". I'm somewhat wary, because some of his projects seem to have been solicited by companies who want publicity for their cookies or whatever. Similarly, some of the "scientificness" of his approach seems to consist of wrapping things in numbers and graphs. A very laudable goal, but in some places the description is pretty dense for a book with that goal.


• Proust Was A Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer. This was really well-written and engaging. Lehrer's idea is to show how various artists/musicians/writers (mostly of a certain Paris avant-garde club, it seems) anticipated recent developments in neuro / cognitive science. For example, Walt Whitman's "the body includes and is the soul" lines, and embodied cognition. I thoroughly enjoyed the arts-description parts and the science-description parts. And sometimes the connection between the two was strong and clear, as in the chapter on Proust; not so much in the chapter on, say, Stravinsky (that one felt forced). Still, eminently worth a read.


• The Time Machine, H.G. Wells. Oh boy, did I ever get the wrong impression from the movie version of this. The book is a lot more realistic and a lot more... quietly horrifying? I don't think it's at all plausible that class separation will lead to humans splitting into two species, but it's thrillingly creepy to imagine humans evolving into either the Eloi or the Morlocks. I guess this one is halfway between dystopia and SF. (And I'm still a fan of the virtual-encyclopedia guy from the movie.)


• Across the Wall, Garth Nix. I'm a big fan of the Abhorsen trilogy, and the first half of Across the Wall is a shorter story that's part of the canon. The rest of the book is a bunch of short stories outside the canon that I didn't find all that interesting. Nix writes young-adult stuff; Abhorsen aged well, IMO.


• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Wow! Franklin gets short-shrifted among the Founding Fathers because he didn't do "hero" stuff like command armies or ride at midnight through Massachusetts, because he doesn't look all that dignified and because the things he did do were quietly behind-the-scenes and/or sounded silly (kite, anyone?). But his autobiography is full of all kinds of interesting things, like the brilliant way he basically tricked the people and the legislature into funding a new hospital. And it's packed to the gills with advice that's a little antiquated, but still good. This is a real self-help book, not some lame thing full of whining and words like "self-actualization". I would have liked to hear more about his experiments with electricity.

In Progress

• Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Douglas Hofstadter. What can I say? This is a book about translation -- but it's also a book by Hofstadter, which means it's a book about the idea of translation stretched and twisted and abstracted and applied to all different kinds of things, and at the same time it's also a book about poetry and music and elegance and math and computer science and AI and love. The book describes itself as something of a memory of Hofstadter's wife, Carol, and it's touching to read it as the world's longest, most elaborate love letter.


• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter. This one is also about music and elegance and poetry, but with a much larger dose of logic and math and AI and symmetry and abstraction. It's more work to get through, but it's so worth it.


• On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Harold McGee. A really well-written guide to food, "scientific" in that it describes foods using scientific terms, not "scientific" in the sense of nutrition-reductionism. Sort of a Hacker's Guide to Culinary Experimentation.

On Deck

• I Am A Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter


• Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, Neal Stephenson


• Vaccine, Arthur Allen


• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke


• On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins


• Dante's Inferno (anybody got recommendations about which translator to read?)