What are the best books about computer science?
Well, I already mentioned “Godel, Escher and Bach”. Another book I liked, Stephen Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” is not actually about computer science, but it does talk about nested structure in natural language as well as other topics related to artificial intelligence. Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere’s “Out of their Minds: the Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists” is excellent. My most recent recommendation is Mitchel Resnick’s “Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds”. Using a simple programming language, the author constructs models of dynamic systems like ant hills and traffic jams, and shows how some complex behaviors can emerge from interactions among simple components. I still haven’t ready Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, but I have heard enough good things that I will recommnend it anyway. If you want to understand the Open Source Software movement (which is the origin of Linux), the standard work is Eric S. R
