Just FYI, you don't need to read books cover to cover.

Even when recommending them?

I’ll bite.

Out of ~15 CS books read, my top pick would be “Learn You A Haskell For Great Good”.

Admittedly most of the CS books I have read are these instructional, O’reilly style books (often teaching a specific language) as opposed to academic texts. But regardless…

It’s a well written book. It introduces Haskell in a comfortable way, at a good pace. And I do like the humor. Or at least, I did when I read it years ago.

It’s also one of the few language specific books that I felt generally broadened me as a programmer. Worth a read regardless of whether you intend to actually use Haskell.

Tie: _A Philosophy of Software Design_ by John Ousterhout

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...

and: _Literate Programming_ Donald Ervin Knuth

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html

Mostly because I view them as two sides of the same coin --- one shows how to design software, the other shows how to document and write the software which one has formally designed.

Walking around my house I found 95 books at first counting --- but I maintain two lists of directly focused on programming books (obviously incompleat):

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams... --- fair number of these I have not yet read, and because they touch on programs I'm not likely to be working with, probably won't, but are listed because I really believe in Literate Programming and want to foster/advocate for it where possible.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams... --- most of these are read, and as noted, this is badly incompleat (but may be affected by some of the books I counted being on other shelves such as "Typography")

That Ousterhout book is really good. I read it over about two weeks on the shitter. Very succinct. My favourite is how he describes what makes a good module, namely a good module is deep and narrow (has a small API but packs non-trivial functionality), rather than wide and shallow (large API but doesn't really do much).

I love Knuth but have not yet added Literate Programming to my library. Have been hoping to find it used somewhere (along with Concrete Mathematics) but hasn't turned up yet.

It's a great book (as is this entire series, and I'm not saying that just 'cause I found a typo and point of improvement in Digital Typography_ and got a Reward Check), but one can get the gist of it from:

http://literateprogramming.com/

and finding a suitable tool for your language of choice and doing a small project --- tangle/weave is such a basic concept that it's notorious for folks rolling their own --- heck, I was able to do it (w/ a bit of help: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/722886/how-to-write-... )

That said, I bought a second copy as a gift from Thriftbooks.com and it was a reasonable price.

The author is an old college friend who was notorious at Georgia Tech for his insatiable reading habit. It actually wouldn't surprise me.

CLRS is much more a reference textbook than one you read cover to cover. Even when I took a class that used the book, we only read a few chapters of it. Based on those few chapters, plus one or two that I read later in life, I'd happily recommend it as a reference to others. I don't think you need to read all of it to do that.

Total books over the years, probably between 200 to 300.

Here’s some of my favourites, cover to cover:

- Steven’s TCP/IP Illustrated

- Maxwell’s Linux Core Kernel

- Tanenbaum’s MINIX book

- Petersen’s Mastering EMacs

- Grune’s Parsing Techniques

- Raymond’s TAOUP

- Schneier’s Applied Cryptography

- “The” Rust book (same as post)

This is exactly what I am doing. I decided in 2022 that I'd record what books I read, and upon completion, write a review of them and rate them, too. I've divided my lists to fiction and non-fiction (so not strictly tech, because I read my tech books a long time ago!).

It also gives me a good indication of how fast I am reading (do I work to live?) and how my taste changes over time.

(interested can see my profile on HN for link)

As chance would have it, I know the author personally. It is virtually certain that he has read all 30 cover to cover. It is nearly as likely that he’s read many more in order to pick out his highlights.

[delayed]

>Experiment: If you have...

Isn't it likely that this article is the result of the authors findings in multiple similar experiments?

For instance, having not read TAoCP personally, I can still reccomend it based on the fact that just about everyone reccomends it and critical words against Knuth I've ever heard were "I wish he'd adopt a modern writing pipeline so he could finish the books faster".