dragonquest

I think Manning/NoStarch/Pragmatic generally have good quality books, but O'Reilly is not too far behind. They just publish a lot many books, so some are bound to be mediocre and some of them absolute gems.

I agree with the Javascript suggestion, and if his primary interest is games - I recommend https://pragprog.com/titles/csjava2/3d-game-programming-for-...

It's a great, structured way to get some hands on experience while having fun!

I really like the wiby.me version of this. It displays results only from early web style pages; a great throwback to an era where not everything was "corporate".

LWN.net (mentioned elsewhere on the thread) is quite good for finding FOSS related content.

I use Personal Knowbase, a small Shareware era program. It has minor annoyances but does what it says on the tin. It's fast, minimal and allows narrowing down to related notes in a jiffy. The makers update it slowly though.

https://www.bitsmithsoft.com/

This is a massive achievement. Being able to run a modern browser and an Office Suite makes it a viable desktop alternative in the coming future. I'm happy to see variety in the desktop OS space once again!

Cleartrip was indeed written in Common Lisp but moved to Java some years ago.

Surely, not SuSe. Novell didn't really handle that well.

A lot of Perl before Java came along.

IIRC I think the name is because they allow a lot of content that other hosts may shy away from.

Learning Lisp, more specifically Scheme. I became curious about it after reading ESR's "How to Become a Hacker". When homoiconicity and other Lisp goodies gradually permeated my brain, the computing world seemed different.

I saw every config file differently, trying to see how the lines between config and code blurred. Method abstractions and bottom up design became much easier. I appreciated all those prefix-evaluation assignments in college. I found a new respect for languages with good REPL's. And finally, it opened my eyes to computing history, where I discovered newer is not always better. The elders of old really got many things right.

This is why you should always create something, even if you think it will never be accepted by a large audience. It is worth it for the journey itself.

Reading this post made me wish I had spent more time with 'gcj'. Though in all honesty I know I gave up on it because I didn't want to go the tougher way - the the normal JDK was just there. Creation is beautiful, and its ending bittersweet for the creator and the witnesses.

Not just one of the best Lisp books; but one of the best books on programming, period.

Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your fantastic editor. It is bloody fantastic and I'm not even an old Wordstar user who just has to use its keybindings. I truly think you have created an almost perfect, light console editor. Could you please consider adding soft-wraps (only emulated, visible line breaks for long lines but no actual breaks saved)?

With that said, to console newbies - you have to try out 'joe' once. It uses the Unix dev environment fantastically and its not short on features either.

Isn't this what DBPedia's SPARQL endpoint was built for?

Construct a query with predicate as http://dbpedia.org/ontology/abstract and you have your summary.

This is fantastic news! Joe is a great editor, thank you Joe Allen.

It has got just the right set of features to be a proper Unix editor that is good at editing and delegating other stuff to other utilities. I love the run shell in this buffer feature. The only thing I wish for is a soft-wrap feature, since I deal with long lines quite a lot.

Rather than a single resource, I would suggest reading the Wikipedia entries of the following: I(D)MS, Ingres, PickOS, Mumps, GT.M, dbm, Datacom and ADABAS. All of them have great historical value.

I consider Guy Steele Jr. to be one of the greatest programmers of all time. And when he praises Stallman that way, you begin to grasp just how brilliant Stallman must be.

Plus 10 hours of Steele and Stallman coding together, what a thing of beauty those 100 lines of pretty-print would be.

> close to 500 million in revenue yearly

You mean 500 Billion.

And hats off to Patrick Volkerding who announced 1.0 and so many years later still going strong announcing 14.1.

I would advise starting off with a good Java book and writing code in a text editor for a week or two before migrating to JDeveloper. It might seem masochistic, but the steep curve pays off later. As for the book, "Java: The Complete Reference (9th Edition)" by Herbert Schildt was recently launched and covers the latest version of Java (Java 8). "Thinking in Java (4th Edition)" by Bruce Eckel is also good, but requires a fair amount of programming experience in other languages.

As for SQL, a short book called "SQL in 10 minutes" by Ben Forta is quite good. Despite it's cheesy sounding name, it is a great resource to get up and running quickly. Not in 10 minutes though. Also (forgive the shameless plug) you can refer to my short ebook "A Primer on SQL", free to read and download.

https://leanpub.com/aprimeronsql/

The overlooked bid in this case was by Vinay Deolalikar for $1000000 who simply said "I think I have done this." For background, Vinay was a researcher at HP Labs, Palo Alto who made a serious attempt at solving the problem (independently from this bid :P).

While I can't speak for other texts, UTP is my and probably the go-to book for learning Troff. I owe the typesetting of my ebook to it. Since it occupies that niche area, it is still quite relevant and useful today.