It's amazing what big production companies will spend these days. Marvel level budgets on 3d modeling. The textures and lighting are so realistic. Just look at how all of the folds in his clothes move in sync with one another in the multi cam view
Your closing comments about understanding how the underlying systems (tcp, transactions etc.) work is GOLD. I’ve been a software engineer for about 20 years and that has been my strategy; it’s served me well. I’ve come across very few others that have spent time doing this
I agree with you that this is something a lot of folks tend to gloss over. I distinctly remember realizing my learning strategy was different from others over a decade ago in school when a friend said to me, "you focus too much on the fundamentals of systems when studying... you need to challenge yourself more and seek the really complex examples". The joke was on him when the exam forced everyone to "go back to basics" and connect two disparate, fundamental systems. Fixating on the hottest new framework or library without understanding the underlying system that powers it will always stunt your progress in truly understanding how to bend the system to your needs. This is especially true as you get more senior in your career and have to "modify that last 20%" that the framework can't do for you.
This is a great list of basics to know. If you don't know the basics, you'll often struggle implementing efficient services on top of those basics. If you're writing any service that's accessed over any kind of network, you absolutely need to understand how routing works, how TCP works (and what its performance characteristics are), how latency affects request timings, and especially: DNS. Otherwise you'll write services that are slow to access, that break down in a lot of circumstances, or you'll spend a lot of money trying to use hyped technology to solve issues that you don't really understand. As a 30 year veteran of programming, sysasdminning & devopsing in all of those fields I love the TCP book recommendation, and for similar reasons I also love the SQL recommendation. Top notch advice here. To the younger or less experienced ones: there's a TON of hard-won knowledge out there that you can benefit from! Use it!
Lets see... There are at least 3 solid reasons why you cannot be an AI: 1. All of the books in the list are really, really good. 2. There is no Fowler/Martin lunacy here. 3. All of the advices that you said are actually correct and useful. Its almost like you are talking from multiple years of solid software development experience. Sounds crazy, I know... Subbed, you definitely earned it.
What's exactly wrong with Martin Fowler's work? Just based on the 2nd ed. of Refactoring, I think the concepts discussed in the book are great. I'm not familiar with his other works though. His emphasis on an incremental (change, test, commit) approach to refactoring is a really good way to tackle improving code quality. Having experience in working with production repos that have 0 tests and maintained by data scientists (no software structure, just giant function blocks), the material in the book gives excellent tips to improve the codebase into something that's maintainable and testable. Edit: Thought I would add that I do take some of his tips with a grain of salt since they can be a little extreme (i.e. I don't agree with having functions for a single line of code.)
I like that your top picks seem to focus more on the development of processes and problem-solving approaches. It feels way more useful than someone just proselytizing their favorite paradigm because they've only worked in one problem domain.
Thank you for the book recommendations. I’m not a programmer myself but I really enjoy listening to people who are passionate and competent in a given topic. I hope you keep making these kinds of videos🙌
The Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series contains many of the most informative and useful books in all of software engineering. The majority are more than 10 years old, some more than 15 years old, a few are more than 20 years old, yet nearly all remain shockingly relevant today...
I was worried it was going to be another softball list, but there's Mythical Man Month right near the top. And assembler recommendation and networking! Good list!
BTW, a modern approach for learning assembler is to try programming for legacy hardware. Assembly for the Atari 2600, NES, C64, Gameboy, and many other "classic" systems is easy to learn, fun, and is a good starting point for understanding modern assembler. No one in their right mind writes modern assembler if they can help it. Today's CPUs are too complex and designed for compilers, not programmers. So it's still important to understand them, but it's not something you will likely ever write.
This video is gold for a newer programmer. Thank you a lot! I would like suggest this content to all junior developers or students, but also for me reading or refresh these topics could be fun and valuable again.
I'm glad to hear that my approach and passion for learning how things work under the hood is not a waste of time. Thank you for providing us with a good list of books that we can refer to whenever we need.
My first programming book I got as a kid was Type and Learn C by Tom Swan. Came with the Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 IDE on a 3.5" floppy that ran on MS-DOS. It was perfect, and I was very fortunate since I randomly picked it up at a bookstore and convinced my parents to buy it (I didn't even know I needed an IDE or a compiler). I was very young. Fourth grade. I suppose my very first programming book came from the school library that same year. I don't remember its title, but it contained only BASIC source code for a number of programs that drew and animated various ASCII art on the screen, with a Halloween theme. I adapted them to QBASIC and then wanted to learn "real programming" and got the other book I mentioned on C. It took me some years to understand the C book, and I was especially stuck on pointers and why they were useful (those were introduced in chapter 4 of that book, if I recall). One day it clicked for me, and my programming knowledge blossomed from there.
I have a Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 User Manual on my shelf. It came out while I was in college. I used it for a bunch of Windows 3.1 programming. lpszMSWindowsHungarianLongVariableNamesWereHorrbleBeforeIntelliSense
What is your reading process? I know you said you did the MIT course while reading the algorithms book, but do you do this for all books? I am trying to read more tech books, but I'm not sure how to read/learn. Like should I read them like a college text book or like a Harry Potter book? Should I take notes? Should I try to do practice problems?
Agree with most, a couple of them I don't have. You missed "Debugging " by David J Agans and "Code complete" by MC Connell. Invaluable for the day to day of a developer. Specially the former little one!
This was great, Carl! Definitely looking for more of these videos! I got excited the Thomas Cormen's green book, it was the one that we studied in college. Overall, I like how your advices on going deep and into the "core" parts of programming and software. It's crazy how, these days, one has to convince people that it's important to understand algorithms and data structures, OS, computer architecture, and such topics ... even if one wouldn't go deep into them.
I am a senior Computer engineer Student. I really appreciate your great advice. every time I watch a video of yours. I learn something new. Thank you, a lot.
That was an excellent selection of books and topics. On the part at the end, I wonder if you have any interviewing tips for either side of the table in relation to finding people with that depth of knowledge or showing that you have it, particularly in an interview where you aren’t asked about it explicitly. I think that would fit nicely into your problems with interviewing series.
A video specifically on Interview Questions is in the works. It's taking a while, because the visuals I'm planning are a lot more complicated than any I've done on the channel so far.
You mentioned finding something in our time that's as new as firewalls back in the day. I think the nail on the head by mentioning LLMs and the new AI craze in general. Do you have any book recommendations for that?
Sadly, I don't think books are the right medium for learning about LLMs. The rate of change in the LLM space is so fast, and the publishing industry has utterly, *utterly* failed to adapt at all, so by the time an LLM book could get through their editorial and publishing process, it would be 2 generations out of date already. I've been using a combination of TH-cam videos, blog posts, journal articles - usually from arxiv.org - and a whole bunch of RTFS (Read the F-ing Source). Nothing has jumped out at me so far as being particular better or worse than anything else, so far. Actually, it feels a lot like a lot of the videos and blogs seem to be copying from each other, and a lot of the content is the same. The Journal Articles are great, but there are a TON of them, and the math can be hard, so they're pretty only good for deep dives into specific items of interest. RTFS is really useful, but very slow. Sorry I don't have a better answer for that topic.
@@InternetOfBugs that’s very fair! Thanks for the detailed response. There are some basics that need to be known though. When I open a white paper about some new technology for Stable Diffusion I don’t understand half the words there. Do you have a resource to learn the basics that help me understand the actual source? Maybe some channel that actually helps me learn things that allows me to learn more forum the source like you mentioned.
@@DoDo-uw2no Not right this moment. I'm still learning it myself, so I wouldn't have any confidence my recommendations would be any better than just Googling for it (which, so far, is largely how i've found what I've been consuming). When I get to the point where I think I can give good recommendations about that, I'll make a video about it.
This may be a hot take but I would start with evolutionary algorithms before stepping into LLMs. I do believe the black box solutions we've built with LLMs are valuable and have their place, but I also believe it is at a point of growth that looking backwards to revisit old concepts might reveal an avenue of growth we weren't aware of or couldn't explore before. Good luck on your journeys!
Thanks for the great video!!! I was looking for a good CS book recommendation video about a month ago and couldn't find anything great. I ended up going with the Pragmatic Programmer because it was recommended to me by one of my professors. Can't wait to dive into it this summer. Keep up the great work!❤
I was wondering if you'd consider making a video about learning/keeping up to date on your own time in this field. I'm studying CS and I do enjoy it but I find it a bit daunting at times to think of all the possible things I could be learning and how the industry might move in a different direction anyway. I also have ADHD (and meds thankfully) and might want to have a family someday too, I was wondering how you managed on your end. I might be overblowing the amount of "keeping up" we have to do in my head too, I don't really know. If you have time, I'd appreciate any perspective you'd have on this. Thank you for the book recs (will definitely be checking out The Pragmatic Programmer), cool video as always!
Short answer: Largely, I track and bring myself up to speed on industry trends when I'm looking for a job by seeing what skills companies are looking for. Often, the skill I'm researching during any current job search doesn't become part of my search criteria until the job search after (assuming that trend is still relevant then). That might not help a lot of people, but since I tend to do project-based work and not ongoing code maintenance work, I look for jobs more frequently than most.
@@InternetOfBugs Thank you for that answer! That makes more sense to me than (foolishly) trying to predict the future. I think I'll have to change jobs relatively often anyways at least at the start, so it's all good, I think it's very applicable. Thank you!
@@nada3131 I'll avoid going into too much autobiographical detail but, based on your description of yourself, I would expect you to prefer changing projects more frequently than, perhaps, the median software professional.
I really dig your channel man. So glad you talked about some of the books in your library. I always like to look through a persons library, because you can get a very good idea of who that person is. Very cool.
You recommended an Assembly book, do you have a specific book you would recommend if I want to learn x86 since it's used basically everywhere? Or should I go with a different architecture?
Thanks for the books, I was very interested in learning more of whats under the hood sience I graduated from college, but didn't know where to start. Plz keep sharing more books
@@jshowao oh well I think thats true in a Computer Science degree, but I got a Systems Engineering degree, which was primarily focus in management stuff and methodologies, yes I had programming courses but nothing deep
@@jshowao oh well I think that's true in a Computer Science degree, but I got a Systems Engineering degree which was primarily focus on management stuff and methodologies. Yes I did have programming courses but nothing too deep
I got my first job a few months ago as an Embedded programmer because I knew that one of the questions was from "The C programming Language" and the chapter it was in (it was one of my favorite examples in the book). The senior interviewer looked at we weird, looked sideways at the other interviewer, looked back at me and said "Ok don't write it, just say how you did it".
I'd heavily endorse the advanced programming in the UNIX environment book. It's very concise when you need to figure out anything. It's a goto reference for myself often easier than google which isn't always common for a textbook.
IMO the best book ever is Peopleware by Tom Demarco. It's not about algorithms or technologies, but about what makes a cohesive, effective team. It is so much more useful than even The Mythical Man-Month.
nice, will be picking up a few of these (x64 asm, transactions, legacy code) algo book i can recommend that's much more readable and pragmatic is The Algorithm Design Manual by S. Skiena
Thanks for your recommendations, I would like to know if you took note on a mindmap software or in a notebook when you read those books ? I tried to do so but sometime I feel like these are throaway notes, I just write it so I can rewrite in my own words and check that I understood what I read, but then I never really re-open those mindmaps. But I guess as long as this step of rephrasing is beneficial and helps me memorize better is useful, it doesn't matter if I reuse or not my notes, as long as it makes me efficient at memorizing
Though you did not include it in your top ten, a book I wrote is visible on your bookshelf and that made my day 💁♀️. It’s a book many people DO hate, so it’s possible it’s waiting its turn for your “Worst ten books” list, but for now 😌.
Thank you so much for this ! I crave fundamental knowledge, not having a Computer Degree but being someone really driven towards knowing what things does under the hood. If anyone has other recommendations I'll gladly take them too !
I think we can confidently say you’re not an AI. I also think that as these models improve, this will likely become a more complicated/scary problem to address. Especially since malicious actors could cause serious damage. Things like stealing money from bank accounts, corporate espionage, and spreading misinformation /manipulating the public would become orders of magnitude easier if you can create a realistic ai/deepfake impersonation of someone.
I really love your videos and advices so far as a 3 YO experienced web frontend developer. I was wondering, realistically, how useful would be for a person in my position some of these books are? I'm genuinely curious and want to understand if I'm missing something. I've worked with transactions before, but only used Stripe for it. I never had to read Assembly to check compiler errors, or understand firewall on a deep level. Do these knowledge become required after a certain years of experience? Would this knowledge be generally helpful for my career? Or are they pretty niche ? Thanks for such high quality content!
Assuming you know how to program already and just want to learn C, I'd say either Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets by Peter van der Linden (www.amazon.com/dp/0131774298) or C Traps and Pitfalls by Andrew Koenig (www.amazon.com/dp/0201179288/). If you don't already feel comfortable programming in another language or two, I'd say don't learn C as your first language - go learn something else, and then come back to C.
K&R is iconic, but I think there are several better books on C out now that point out and discuss aspects of the language that have become a problem, e.g. strcpy() vs strncpy(). Of those, I don't have a clear favorite.
Greate content as always. Thanks. For "whatever is important at a given time", can you can make a similar video about the thing that's important at this given time; IA ? Thanks again.
See my "new jobs AI will create for devs" video: th-cam.com/video/UqYSaAuKwjU/w-d-xo.html Also, someday, Augmented Reality is going to be HUGE - as soon as we get smart glasses that look acceptable to be worn in public that can overlay graphics over what the users sees in the real world. No idea when that hardware will finally be available, though, so it's hard to know how much time it's worth investing in learning it now.
I'd say it's not as good as APUE, but it's more relevant these days. So it probably would be a better time investment if you primarily work with Linux (& most people are)
For the sake of transparency, do you delete comments with swears in them? because I am certain I left a comment on this video a few days ago and I wanted to copy it over to something else and couldn't find it, but it's also possible that the comment was just too long or I forgot to post it, lol. (I am usually pretty good at filtering out the swears)
5:05 - I'm sorry for being so precise... The stuff you mentioned there living is SQL is actually living in a RDBMS (relational database management system). SQL - Structured Query Language - is the language one uses for data retrieval and manipulation.
Much of the material you mentioned is what makes me effectively what I am and building software is not one of them, knowing assembler, networking fundamentals, or simply put the kinda person who deals with vulnerabilities, exploits and cyberthreats. Not really a penetration tester nor cybersecurity person (I find the courses these days trivial and not on par with what we do). Hacking albeit for the greater good, also much have changed, doing 'red hat' work ALWAYS came with a NDA. Regardless, good selection... I do not have much interest in 'AI' (soon people will realize the cost of Generative AI and by this I mean environmental, the scaling factor, energy requirements, CO2) regardless, great selection
Thanks for this. What are your thoughts on Designing Data Intensive Applications? I also think Distributed Systems by Tanenbaum and van Steen is a must have.
They're... shallow? I'm not a fan of those, but I have higher standards. I've spent a big chunk of my career on the Ops side (what we used to call "SysAdmin"), and I've designed and built 100K+ user fault-tolerant systems before. And this was back in the days before cloud, when that meant we had to spec, install and configure the server hardware (SparcServer 690s) and the network gear (Cisco catalyst 6500 series switches with 7200 series routers) and even install software (i.e. Oracle) by actually putting discs in the computers. I guess those books might be a decent survey for developers who want to be aware of the high-level concepts of distributed systems but aren't going to be involved in (and don't want to understand) any of the nuts and bolts of how they actually work. But I find them to just be lists of topics, each of which you would need to go and read a real book on in order to understand. I have a single book on Oracle RAC (Oracle's fault-tolerant application cluster product) that is 600+ pages (and a have a separate book on performance tuning RAC with details that weren't in the first book). There's just far, far too little detail in those overview books for me to find them valuable.
I would like to comment on Sql for smarties.. I guess it’s kinda outdated since the db engines are evolving fast .. I faced that with SQL Cook book when I found out that most of the TSql advanced topics weren’t covered because they weren’t developed by Microsoft at the time the book released. So I guess anyone want to buy better to know why you buying ? for a reference Or for work related experience. Thanks for your time
Maybe not that one (although I learned from it and I'd been doing SQL for a while when I read it), but it's a series. The trees and hierarchies one was completely full of stuff I'd never even thought to try. Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) www.amazon.com/Hierarchies-Smarties-Kaufmann-Management-Systems/dp/0123877334
Right now the best test for "not being an AI" is to speak in understandable and "time specific" nonsense. Something something "youth culture" evolves so fast AI can't keep up and pick up the nuances. So, talking about Rizz, but exuding dad energy while doing it -- is just layers on layers AI can't do yet.
I've read a few of those. I find (found?) them a refreshing change from the normal, dry, boring tech writing. The Java one was only okay. My favorite of that series was the Design Patterns one. It should be on one of those shelves somewhere. (I really need to re-sort them all, but it never lasts - as I get new books and the place they should normally go is full, it's too much effort to rearrange everything to make room, so I end up putting them somewhere else, and before long, it's chaos again).
They are from www.containerstore.com/s/elfa/1 The specific part numbers I have don't exist any more, but the ones they sell now are more or less the same. Be careful with any shelves like that with books, though! This was not fun: instagram.com/carl_brwn/p/C4vsp4XOm8D/ And once I put them back up, I braced the vertical supports with custom-length 2x4s to keep that from happening again: instagram.com/p/C6PKQdLOPu-/
This books are very pricey in poland, any other recomendation or just get another book of topic with good reviews? For me spending 50+ dolars for book its quite a lot when most of books here cost 10 to max 20 dolars each.
Can you borrow an electronic copy from search.worldcat.org/title/1100829217 ? I don't know if there are participating locations in your country, but it might be worth a try.
In general, I like OOP, but I think Inheritance is very often problematic and should be avoided except in very simplified cases. [I vastly prefer en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance ] Design Patterns kinda work okay as shared vocabulary? It's useful to be able to have a "trade offs of Adapter vs Facade for encapsulating this API" discussion without having spend a lot of time setting up the problem. I think people tend to treat them as more significant/important/useful than they actually are. That said, I think many of the classical patterns are just stupid. AbstractFactoryBuilderPattern is an abomination against sanity.
Indeed, I am. In fact, the single piece of art hanging in my office (in about the only corner of the room that didn't have a camera pointed at it in this last video) is www.amazon.com/Trends-International-Expanse-Roci-Poster-Version/dp/B08QC2PM6P
Wow. OpenAI Sora is getting more and more realistic.
This demo really blew my mind
It's amazing what big production companies will spend these days. Marvel level budgets on 3d modeling. The textures and lighting are so realistic. Just look at how all of the folds in his clothes move in sync with one another in the multi cam view
probably This will be the favorite meme in the future of this channel
@@PapasSaladas246 we need to capitalize on this early
Your closing comments about understanding how the underlying systems (tcp, transactions etc.) work is GOLD. I’ve been a software engineer for about 20 years and that has been my strategy; it’s served me well. I’ve come across very few others that have spent time doing this
I agree with you that this is something a lot of folks tend to gloss over. I distinctly remember realizing my learning strategy was different from others over a decade ago in school when a friend said to me, "you focus too much on the fundamentals of systems when studying... you need to challenge yourself more and seek the really complex examples".
The joke was on him when the exam forced everyone to "go back to basics" and connect two disparate, fundamental systems. Fixating on the hottest new framework or library without understanding the underlying system that powers it will always stunt your progress in truly understanding how to bend the system to your needs. This is especially true as you get more senior in your career and have to "modify that last 20%" that the framework can't do for you.
This is a great list of basics to know. If you don't know the basics, you'll often struggle implementing efficient services on top of those basics. If you're writing any service that's accessed over any kind of network, you absolutely need to understand how routing works, how TCP works (and what its performance characteristics are), how latency affects request timings, and especially: DNS. Otherwise you'll write services that are slow to access, that break down in a lot of circumstances, or you'll spend a lot of money trying to use hyped technology to solve issues that you don't really understand.
As a 30 year veteran of programming, sysasdminning & devopsing in all of those fields I love the TCP book recommendation, and for similar reasons I also love the SQL recommendation. Top notch advice here.
To the younger or less experienced ones: there's a TON of hard-won knowledge out there that you can benefit from! Use it!
Oh, great, 10 new books to add to my reading backlog. Many thanks!
Exactly, I'm now sitting at around 35-40 and that's just computer science books. xD
Discovering your channel was one of the best things that happened to me this semester, looking forward to learning from you.
I'm very thankful for his content, and it brings me some relief to know there are people currently studying who are exposed to his experience now.
@@cthecheese1620 indeed
Lets see... There are at least 3 solid reasons why you cannot be an AI:
1. All of the books in the list are really, really good.
2. There is no Fowler/Martin lunacy here.
3. All of the advices that you said are actually correct and useful. Its almost like you are talking from multiple years of solid software development experience. Sounds crazy, I know...
Subbed, you definitely earned it.
What's exactly wrong with Martin Fowler's work? Just based on the 2nd ed. of Refactoring, I think the concepts discussed in the book are great. I'm not familiar with his other works though. His emphasis on an incremental (change, test, commit) approach to refactoring is a really good way to tackle improving code quality. Having experience in working with production repos that have 0 tests and maintained by data scientists (no software structure, just giant function blocks), the material in the book gives excellent tips to improve the codebase into something that's maintainable and testable.
Edit: Thought I would add that I do take some of his tips with a grain of salt since they can be a little extreme (i.e. I don't agree with having functions for a single line of code.)
I like that your top picks seem to focus more on the development of processes and problem-solving approaches. It feels way more useful than someone just proselytizing their favorite paradigm because they've only worked in one problem domain.
Thank you for the book recommendations. I’m not a programmer myself but I really enjoy listening to people who are passionate and competent in a given topic. I hope you keep making these kinds of videos🙌
Thank you! I was hoping you'd make a book recommendation video
There will be more. But this one, I hope, is a good start.
you are the senior mentor we all need on the Internet. Your vids are packed with a ton of resourceful guides !!!
The Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series contains many of the most informative and useful books in all of software engineering. The majority are more than 10 years old, some more than 15 years old, a few are more than 20 years old, yet nearly all remain shockingly relevant today...
The wisdom on finding the things people dont care to learn is a gem. Thank you sir!
I was worried it was going to be another softball list, but there's Mythical Man Month right near the top. And assembler recommendation and networking! Good list!
BTW, a modern approach for learning assembler is to try programming for legacy hardware. Assembly for the Atari 2600, NES, C64, Gameboy, and many other "classic" systems is easy to learn, fun, and is a good starting point for understanding modern assembler.
No one in their right mind writes modern assembler if they can help it. Today's CPUs are too complex and designed for compilers, not programmers. So it's still important to understand them, but it's not something you will likely ever write.
Great list! Also, I love Mars Congressional Navy shirt from The Expanse!
In the end, the only thing that matters is who's covering your flank.
pragmatic programmer helped me out a lot and now there are 9 more to go, your advice is great, thank you!
This video is gold for a newer programmer. Thank you a lot!
I would like suggest this content to all junior developers or students, but also for me reading or refresh these topics could be fun and valuable again.
The self-referential ironic joke leading into the intro is actually the proof that convinces me that you are no AI almost.
😂😂
That double space in your comment convinces me that you're not an AI
I love your channel. It’s been giving me hope for this industry in these difficult times.
I love your channel. I’ve been recently recommending you to my colleagues at work 😊
Awesome! Thank you!
I'm glad to hear that my approach and passion for learning how things work under the hood is not a waste of time. Thank you for providing us with a good list of books that we can refer to whenever we need.
My first programming book I got as a kid was Type and Learn C by Tom Swan. Came with the Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 IDE on a 3.5" floppy that ran on MS-DOS. It was perfect, and I was very fortunate since I randomly picked it up at a bookstore and convinced my parents to buy it (I didn't even know I needed an IDE or a compiler). I was very young. Fourth grade.
I suppose my very first programming book came from the school library that same year. I don't remember its title, but it contained only BASIC source code for a number of programs that drew and animated various ASCII art on the screen, with a Halloween theme. I adapted them to QBASIC and then wanted to learn "real programming" and got the other book I mentioned on C.
It took me some years to understand the C book, and I was especially stuck on pointers and why they were useful (those were introduced in chapter 4 of that book, if I recall). One day it clicked for me, and my programming knowledge blossomed from there.
I have a Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 User Manual on my shelf. It came out while I was in college. I used it for a bunch of Windows 3.1 programming. lpszMSWindowsHungarianLongVariableNamesWereHorrbleBeforeIntelliSense
@@InternetOfBugs Yes, I became accustomed to those when I acquired a copy of Visual Studio 5.0 and the MSDN documentation discs.
Swan's Mastering Turbo Assembler was very important for my low level programming skills
What is your reading process? I know you said you did the MIT course while reading the algorithms book, but do you do this for all books? I am trying to read more tech books, but I'm not sure how to read/learn. Like should I read them like a college text book or like a Harry Potter book? Should I take notes? Should I try to do practice problems?
I've read the first 3 books. A book that I really liked about people in software is "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams"
read it for a project management course, amazing book
Agree with most, a couple of them I don't have. You missed "Debugging " by David J Agans and "Code complete" by MC Connell. Invaluable for the day to day of a developer. Specially the former little one!
This was great, Carl! Definitely looking for more of these videos!
I got excited the Thomas Cormen's green book, it was the one that we studied in college. Overall, I like how your advices on going deep and into the "core" parts of programming and software. It's crazy how, these days, one has to convince people that it's important to understand algorithms and data structures, OS, computer architecture, and such topics ... even if one wouldn't go deep into them.
Not much to say just commenting for the algorithm, thank you Carl, I feel we have about a billion things we could learn from you. Cheers
Great list, great advice. Thanks (big) brother! All the best 💪
I am a senior Computer engineer Student. I really appreciate your great advice. every time I watch a video of yours. I learn something new. Thank you, a lot.
That was an excellent selection of books and topics.
On the part at the end, I wonder if you have any interviewing tips for either side of the table in relation to finding people with that depth of knowledge or showing that you have it, particularly in an interview where you aren’t asked about it explicitly.
I think that would fit nicely into your problems with interviewing series.
A video specifically on Interview Questions is in the works. It's taking a while, because the visuals I'm planning are a lot more complicated than any I've done on the channel so far.
Love the MCRN shirt!
Your advice at the end is pure gold! Definitely not AI 😊
You mentioned finding something in our time that's as new as firewalls back in the day. I think the nail on the head by mentioning LLMs and the new AI craze in general. Do you have any book recommendations for that?
Sadly, I don't think books are the right medium for learning about LLMs. The rate of change in the LLM space is so fast, and the publishing industry has utterly, *utterly* failed to adapt at all, so by the time an LLM book could get through their editorial and publishing process, it would be 2 generations out of date already.
I've been using a combination of TH-cam videos, blog posts, journal articles - usually from arxiv.org - and a whole bunch of RTFS (Read the F-ing Source).
Nothing has jumped out at me so far as being particular better or worse than anything else, so far. Actually, it feels a lot like a lot of the videos and blogs seem to be copying from each other, and a lot of the content is the same.
The Journal Articles are great, but there are a TON of them, and the math can be hard, so they're pretty only good for deep dives into specific items of interest.
RTFS is really useful, but very slow.
Sorry I don't have a better answer for that topic.
@@InternetOfBugs that’s very fair! Thanks for the detailed response.
There are some basics that need to be known though. When I open a white paper about some new technology for Stable Diffusion I don’t understand half the words there.
Do you have a resource to learn the basics that help me understand the actual source? Maybe some channel that actually helps me learn things that allows me to learn more forum the source like you mentioned.
@@DoDo-uw2no Not right this moment. I'm still learning it myself, so I wouldn't have any confidence my recommendations would be any better than just Googling for it (which, so far, is largely how i've found what I've been consuming).
When I get to the point where I think I can give good recommendations about that, I'll make a video about it.
This may be a hot take but I would start with evolutionary algorithms before stepping into LLMs.
I do believe the black box solutions we've built with LLMs are valuable and have their place, but I also believe it is at a point of growth that looking backwards to revisit old concepts might reveal an avenue of growth we weren't aware of or couldn't explore before.
Good luck on your journeys!
That's a gem of a channel
Thanks for the great video!!! I was looking for a good CS book recommendation video about a month ago and couldn't find anything great. I ended up going with the Pragmatic Programmer because it was recommended to me by one of my professors. Can't wait to dive into it this summer. Keep up the great work!❤
At your time, i guess MIT had the legendary SICP intro course 😎
Are kidding, I love assembler, but great list. Also so glad you mentioned packets.
That feeling when the first book you pull out is one I own but haven't read yet, but I also have a million other things to study before I get to it.
I was wondering if you'd consider making a video about learning/keeping up to date on your own time in this field. I'm studying CS and I do enjoy it but I find it a bit daunting at times to think of all the possible things I could be learning and how the industry might move in a different direction anyway. I also have ADHD (and meds thankfully) and might want to have a family someday too, I was wondering how you managed on your end. I might be overblowing the amount of "keeping up" we have to do in my head too, I don't really know. If you have time, I'd appreciate any perspective you'd have on this.
Thank you for the book recs (will definitely be checking out The Pragmatic Programmer), cool video as always!
Short answer: Largely, I track and bring myself up to speed on industry trends when I'm looking for a job by seeing what skills companies are looking for. Often, the skill I'm researching during any current job search doesn't become part of my search criteria until the job search after (assuming that trend is still relevant then). That might not help a lot of people, but since I tend to do project-based work and not ongoing code maintenance work, I look for jobs more frequently than most.
@@InternetOfBugs Thank you for that answer! That makes more sense to me than (foolishly) trying to predict the future. I think I'll have to change jobs relatively often anyways at least at the start, so it's all good, I think it's very applicable. Thank you!
@@nada3131 I'll avoid going into too much autobiographical detail but, based on your description of yourself, I would expect you to prefer changing projects more frequently than, perhaps, the median software professional.
@@InternetOfBugs Gotta keep that dopamine deficient mind entertained somehow haha, you got it chief.
@@nada3131 [Insert Captain America's Avengers "I understood that reference" meme here]
would be cool to see an entire bookshelf tour. looks like you have books that cover a wide range of languages, plus a good number of networking books.
Yay, a video I requested, thank you!
I really dig your channel man. So glad you talked about some of the books in your library. I always like to look through a persons library, because you can get a very good idea of who that person is. Very cool.
You recommended an Assembly book, do you have a specific book you would recommend if I want to learn x86 since it's used basically everywhere? Or should I go with a different architecture?
Looking at the back of your shoulder, I see you also have the CRC, nice touch wouldn't expect that from most people in software.
Thanks for the books, I was very interested in learning more of whats under the hood sience I graduated from college, but didn't know where to start. Plz keep sharing more books
Thats ironic because all of college basically teaches you "under the hood" things.
@@jshowao oh well I think thats true in a Computer Science degree, but I got a Systems Engineering degree, which was primarily focus in management stuff and methodologies, yes I had programming courses but nothing deep
@@jshowao oh well I think that's true in a Computer Science degree, but I got a Systems Engineering degree which was primarily focus on management stuff and methodologies. Yes I did have programming courses but nothing too deep
I got my first job a few months ago as an Embedded programmer because I knew that one of the questions was from "The C programming Language" and the chapter it was in (it was one of my favorite examples in the book). The senior interviewer looked at we weird, looked sideways at the other interviewer, looked back at me and said "Ok don't write it, just say how you did it".
Thank you a lot. This was very helpful! Glad I found this channel.
Finally, some interesting books to read =))
I'd heavily endorse the advanced programming in the UNIX environment book. It's very concise when you need to figure out anything. It's a goto reference for myself often easier than google which isn't always common for a textbook.
IMO the best book ever is Peopleware by Tom Demarco. It's not about algorithms or technologies, but about what makes a cohesive, effective team. It is so much more useful than even The Mythical Man-Month.
nice, will be picking up a few of these (x64 asm, transactions, legacy code) algo book i can recommend that's much more readable and pragmatic is The Algorithm Design Manual by S. Skiena
It's so rare now to see so much books on shelves.
Thanks for your recommendations, I would like to know if you took note on a mindmap software or in a notebook when you read those books ? I tried to do so but sometime I feel like these are throaway notes, I just write it so I can rewrite in my own words and check that I understood what I read, but then I never really re-open those mindmaps.
But I guess as long as this step of rephrasing is beneficial and helps me memorize better is useful, it doesn't matter if I reuse or not my notes, as long as it makes me efficient at memorizing
Though you did not include it in your top ten, a book I wrote is visible on your bookshelf and that made my day 💁♀️.
It’s a book many people DO hate, so it’s possible it’s waiting its turn for your “Worst ten books” list, but for now 😌.
Thank you so much for this ! I crave fundamental knowledge, not having a Computer Degree but being someone really driven towards knowing what things does under the hood. If anyone has other recommendations I'll gladly take them too !
ya the pragmatic programmer yay!! ETC changed my life
I think we can confidently say you’re not an AI. I also think that as these models improve, this will likely become a more complicated/scary problem to address. Especially since malicious actors could cause serious damage. Things like stealing money from bank accounts, corporate espionage, and spreading misinformation /manipulating the public would become orders of magnitude easier if you can create a realistic ai/deepfake impersonation of someone.
Yeah. The last video I made was largely about that: th-cam.com/video/_2rWXVcWMt4/w-d-xo.html
I really love your videos and advices so far as a 3 YO experienced web frontend developer. I was wondering, realistically, how useful would be for a person in my position some of these books are? I'm genuinely curious and want to understand if I'm missing something. I've worked with transactions before, but only used Stripe for it. I never had to read Assembly to check compiler errors, or understand firewall on a deep level.
Do these knowledge become required after a certain years of experience? Would this knowledge be generally helpful for my career? Or are they pretty niche ?
Thanks for such high quality content!
Wow, haven't heard of many of these, all sound excellent
I was wondering if you would consider "Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach" by James Bach for testing?
any recommendation on a C book?
Assuming you know how to program already and just want to learn C, I'd say either Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets by Peter van der Linden (www.amazon.com/dp/0131774298) or C Traps and Pitfalls by Andrew Koenig (www.amazon.com/dp/0201179288/).
If you don't already feel comfortable programming in another language or two, I'd say don't learn C as your first language - go learn something else, and then come back to C.
The Corman's algorithm book every student should have and the Pragmatic Programmer every professional .
fantastic video!
Nice complete calvin and hobbes in the top right there
What about The C programming Language by K&R?
K&R is iconic, but I think there are several better books on C out now that point out and discuss aspects of the language that have become a problem, e.g. strcpy() vs strncpy(). Of those, I don't have a clear favorite.
Do you have any book recommendations for AI / ML, LLMs?
Greate content as always. Thanks.
For "whatever is important at a given time", can you can make a similar video about the thing that's important at this given time; IA ?
Thanks again.
See my "new jobs AI will create for devs" video: th-cam.com/video/UqYSaAuKwjU/w-d-xo.html
Also, someday, Augmented Reality is going to be HUGE - as soon as we get smart glasses that look acceptable to be worn in public that can overlay graphics over what the users sees in the real world. No idea when that hardware will finally be available, though, so it's hard to know how much time it's worth investing in learning it now.
Hey man, what do you think about The Linux Programming Interface book? Is it as good as Advanced Programming in Unix Environment?
I'd say it's not as good as APUE, but it's more relevant these days. So it probably would be a better time investment if you primarily work with Linux (& most people are)
For the sake of transparency, do you delete comments with swears in them? because I am certain I left a comment on this video a few days ago and I wanted to copy it over to something else and couldn't find it, but it's also possible that the comment was just too long or I forgot to post it, lol.
(I am usually pretty good at filtering out the swears)
Just curious if you have all of or any volumes in "The Art of Programming" by Donald Knuth; if so, would you recommend?
Alas, I have not read them. I probably should, but I've never really had the time to commit to them.
I would like a video where he shows how he troubleshoots network packets, ASM code and OS calls
What a flex ai with 6 pov cameras. Insane.
just kidding and love your vids!
5:05 - I'm sorry for being so precise... The stuff you mentioned there living is SQL is actually living in a RDBMS (relational database management system). SQL - Structured Query Language - is the language one uses for data retrieval and manipulation.
Love how you are battling the AI allegations 😂 Great channel!
thank you carl
Much of the material you mentioned is what makes me effectively what I am and building software is not one of them, knowing assembler, networking fundamentals, or simply put the kinda person who deals with vulnerabilities, exploits and cyberthreats. Not really a penetration tester nor cybersecurity person (I find the courses these days trivial and not on par with what we do). Hacking albeit for the greater good, also much have changed, doing 'red hat' work ALWAYS came with a NDA. Regardless, good selection... I do not have much interest in 'AI' (soon people will realize the cost of Generative AI and by this I mean environmental, the scaling factor, energy requirements, CO2) regardless, great selection
EXCELLENT VIDEO
Thanks for this. What are your thoughts on Designing Data Intensive Applications? I also think Distributed Systems by Tanenbaum and van Steen is a must have.
They're... shallow?
I'm not a fan of those, but I have higher standards. I've spent a big chunk of my career on the Ops side (what we used to call "SysAdmin"), and I've designed and built 100K+ user fault-tolerant systems before. And this was back in the days before cloud, when that meant we had to spec, install and configure the server hardware (SparcServer 690s) and the network gear (Cisco catalyst 6500 series switches with 7200 series routers) and even install software (i.e. Oracle) by actually putting discs in the computers.
I guess those books might be a decent survey for developers who want to be aware of the high-level concepts of distributed systems but aren't going to be involved in (and don't want to understand) any of the nuts and bolts of how they actually work. But I find them to just be lists of topics, each of which you would need to go and read a real book on in order to understand.
I have a single book on Oracle RAC (Oracle's fault-tolerant application cluster product) that is 600+ pages (and a have a separate book on performance tuning RAC with details that weren't in the first book). There's just far, far too little detail in those overview books for me to find them valuable.
I would like to comment on Sql for smarties.. I guess it’s kinda outdated since the db engines are evolving fast .. I faced that with SQL Cook book when I found out that most of the TSql advanced topics weren’t covered because they weren’t developed by Microsoft at the time the book released. So I guess anyone want to buy better to know why you buying ? for a reference Or for work related experience.
Thanks for your time
I'd also like to point out The Complete Calvin and Hobbes on your top shelf.
Well Spotted.
Now I can tell my wife I'm part of a book club too!
The book about SQL is very interesting but if u already know sql what is exactly the important from this book?
Maybe not that one (although I learned from it and I'd been doing SQL for a while when I read it), but it's a series. The trees and hierarchies one was completely full of stuff I'd never even thought to try.
Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
www.amazon.com/Hierarchies-Smarties-Kaufmann-Management-Systems/dp/0123877334
Right now the best test for "not being an AI" is to speak in understandable and "time specific" nonsense. Something something "youth culture" evolves so fast AI can't keep up and pick up the nuances. So, talking about Rizz, but exuding dad energy while doing it -- is just layers on layers AI can't do yet.
I thought you are not fan of unit test, but working effectively with legacy code talks about unit tests in favour of it?
I see you read the Head First Java book. Any opinion on the Head First book series?
I've read a few of those. I find (found?) them a refreshing change from the normal, dry, boring tech writing.
The Java one was only okay. My favorite of that series was the Design Patterns one. It should be on one of those shelves somewhere. (I really need to re-sort them all, but it never lasts - as I get new books and the place they should normally go is full, it's too much effort to rearrange everything to make room, so I end up putting them somewhere else, and before long, it's chaos again).
definitely something Max Headroomish in the eyes
How do I build a shelf like this? It looks adjustable?
They are from www.containerstore.com/s/elfa/1
The specific part numbers I have don't exist any more, but the ones they sell now are more or less the same.
Be careful with any shelves like that with books, though!
This was not fun: instagram.com/carl_brwn/p/C4vsp4XOm8D/
And once I put them back up, I braced the vertical supports with custom-length 2x4s to keep that from happening again:
instagram.com/p/C6PKQdLOPu-/
How about a book tour of the shelf behind you?
I have one of those Dilbert heads too
I really dig your videos
This books are very pricey in poland, any other recomendation or just get another book of topic with good reviews? For me spending 50+ dolars for book its quite a lot when most of books here cost 10 to max 20 dolars each.
Is there a specific book that you want to find a cheaper alternative to?
@@InternetOfBugs At the moment only for TCP/IP book, its look very interesting subject i never truly learnt.
Can you borrow an electronic copy from search.worldcat.org/title/1100829217 ? I don't know if there are participating locations in your country, but it might be worth a try.
I tried reading SQL for Smarties, but couldn't. It's not a book. It's a reference manual.
Yeah another cool video
Be interested to hear what you think about design patterns and OOP.
My guess is that you hate them.
In general, I like OOP, but I think Inheritance is very often problematic and should be avoided except in very simplified cases. [I vastly prefer en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance ]
Design Patterns kinda work okay as shared vocabulary? It's useful to be able to have a "trade offs of Adapter vs Facade for encapsulating this API" discussion without having spend a lot of time setting up the problem. I think people tend to treat them as more significant/important/useful than they actually are.
That said, I think many of the classical patterns are just stupid. AbstractFactoryBuilderPattern is an abomination against sanity.
@@InternetOfBugs Never heard of abstractfactorybuilder pattern, but I have implemented factory patterns and found them to be quite useful
Couldn't agree more with the SQL book.
Why is this book so good?
Crafting interpreters is a good book for your list
Thanks
Thanks.
MCRN, dude is a fan of The Expanse
Indeed, I am. In fact, the single piece of art hanging in my office (in about the only corner of the room that didn't have a camera pointed at it in this last video) is www.amazon.com/Trends-International-Expanse-Roci-Poster-Version/dp/B08QC2PM6P
Perfect.
THE EXPANSE MENTIONED
Beratna!!!