Well, given the nature of TidBITS, I’d say you should share stuff related to Macs and computing in general.
(I’ve also got dozens of shelves of other stuff, but I don’t think most people here will care too much about the non-computer-related texts.)
I use on-line references for a lot of stuff today, like for a C++ reference, but a lot of these books are old and unavailable in electronic format.
Plus, it is often easier to use physical books for reference. It’s really easy to put Post It flags on important pages so you can quickly jump to the sections you frequently need to reference. Not nearly so easy for an e-book, especially if you’re already very low on screen real-estate.
Dewhurst’s book is a great read for experienced developers - pointing out common mistakes made by C++ programmers, along with why they’re mistakes and a better way to do the same thing.
Another really great set of references are the “Thinking in…” books by Bruce Eckel. These books explain how the design of certain languages (Java and C++) encourage applications to be designed in particular ways, and why you should think about your designs along those lines when developing with those languages.
His company (books, seminars, etc.) is Mindview and its quick links page has several great things, including links to the full text of Thinking In C++ and Thinking in Java.
I’ll play, but I don’t have time for nearly as good photos as @Shamino’s—you’ll have to zoom in to see titles. These are the four bookshelves that contain tech books and boxed software. Remember that? You’ll even find the Mac OS 8 box.
Bookshelves in my actual office. At one point, many of these books were in somewhat frequent use. Now they’re basically just decorative, though I sometimes pull one out to make a historical point. All the ones on the top of the shelves are mine, and there are a bunch from friends too.
Bookshelf in the hallway, with more generic computing books, many from the library of the late, great Cary Lu. He left me 250 shelf-feet of books and software when he died, and I culled to the best stuff. And an SE/30 case. I don’t think it works at all.
I am fortunate enough to work in a large academic library, and my interests are pretty aligned with the collection scope of the library - so I effectively have an extension of more than 3 million books that I can check out at short notice, plus the ability to request for pretty much anything (that is not out of scope) ;). That gave me the opportunity to check out these titles recently:
My personal collection is mostly focused on design, travel and biographies - plus classic works that I can access via libraries, but nonetheless would like to refer to quickly (and perhaps for that warm feeling of owning those books).
Note that it doesn’t include probably my most highly recommended book on programming, Writing Solid Code, which is on my bed side table for a re-read.
And here’s my software archive bookshelf, with some awards, and if you look closely enough, a picture of a particularly appropriate person on this forum ;-)
I completely concur. I worked with Bruce back in the late 80s, doing embedded firmware development at the same company; he left a few years afterwards, and eventually started Mindview. Years later, when I needed to learn C++ (Visual C++ and MFC, oh my…), I took his Thinking in C++ class, based on, and in tandem with, his book.
Extremely thoughtful person and an excellent communicator – this really comes through in Thinking in C++. Also, his contributions to the C++ language over the years on the C++ Standards Committee have been significant. (And just a super nice person.)
I’ve never read Bertin’s book, but it’s acknowledged, along with some key examples from the book, in Edward Tufte’s books/seminars on of effective information graphics.
I need to take a look at it someday. (So many books, so little time – particularly when you get to my age!)
How I wish I have the time to read all the books that look interesting! I think I have become aware of Bertin’s book from one of Tufte’s work as well (which is also in the library collection).
Also, there are some particularly interesting works recommended by The Economist’s data journalism team - one being W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualising Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century - the richness of the visualisation contrasts with the availability of visualisation tools (or lack thereof) - and to think that most of the data and visualisations can be easily created today with a few lines of code in R or Python.
Of all the things that have made me feel my own mortality over the years, I don’t think any have hit as hard as the realization that I am not going to read all the books I assumed that I would read “someday,” including books on my own shelves.
As a professional writer, I do a lot of referencing, and it depends on what I’m doing. Post-its or even random slips of paper are great to mark pages in a paper book. For ebooks with embedded text (like most pdfs), I can copy and paste onto another part of my 27-inch screen, then expand the text to a comfortable size for reading. I also cut and paste to get the spelling of long words or long names right. It’s also easier on my neck and eyes if the source and what I’m writing are both right in front of my eyes. But you must have a large screen or multiple screens for this to work. If I’m just reading, I prefer the sharpness and high contrast of paper to a screen, and my vision can’t deal with small type on a screen.
Between leaving Ireland to emigrate to the US in the early Nineties and then returning before the Millennium I had two occasions where all my books were given away or donated. I emigrated with a carryon and a guitar, left a BA and half of a PhD in books with various folks. All Philosophy. No takers for my Computing books which I donated.
Don’t think I’ve bought a computing book this Century… As for now nearly all my books in the studio are photography related. There’s a few stacks around the room depending on what’s going on. I am constantly referring to these for teaching and inspiration.
I started off with an SE/30, System 6.3.
System 7 and ResEdit were life-changing. Did DTP at MS Press for about 5 years which accounts for some of the books here.
One of my prize possessions is The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 1991 MIT Press. It’s in the middle of the second photo. Tons of technical terms, buzzwords, anecdotes:
Heisenbug /hi: zen-buhg/ [from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of Bohr bug; see also mandelbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from either fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc arena) or errors that smash the stack.
(what!?!) and
RTM /R-T-M/ [USENET: acronym for Read The Manual’] 1. Politer variant of RTFM. 2. Robert T. Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988; villain to many, naïve hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris’s name on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.
Loved the term "buffer management” as applied to the use of a restroom.
Would love to know if anyone is familiar with Microsoft Bob, top photo.
While I posted a sub-section of my bookshelf showing my Inside Macintosh books (lower left corner), here’s the full picture of my “technical” bookcase:
The left shelf is programming and graphic design, the middle is writing-related, and the right side are mostly my own books (print editions of my Xojo programming magazine, xDev).
As soon as I saw the book, I exclaimed, “OMG! A Microsoft Bob book!” I doubt that I’ve consciously thought of Bob in at least twenty years. Somehow, my brain has kept a bunch of neurons around all this time, doing nothing but quietly storing memories of Bob.
I know Bob received a lot of criticism, but I think some of it isn’t really fair. It was inevitable that someone was going to try to build that kind of ultra-skeuomorphic interface at scale. Microsoft was neither the first nor the last to try it; it was just the most high-profile attempt. I miss the sense of experimentation that UI/UX design had in those days (as opposed to today’s design changes for the sake of making design changes), even if many of the experiments were failures.
It was fun to watch a few Microsoft Bob videos just now. There were moments when I saw a clear Hypercard influence on Bob, and others when I saw the influence of the original graphical AOL and eWorld clients on it. Strangely, I sometimes felt that walking into a virtual room and having floating windows appear wasn’t all that far away from…VisionOS, only built with thirty year-old technology.
The book on the shelf is At Home with MS Bob, a companion to a very simplified OS for PCs. Family oriented. I think Clippy was replaced by a little dog. I understand it was a project led by Melinda Gates. Never saw it in a store.
Every installation CD of Windows XP includes, as a cryptographic ballast for the product activation algorithm, multiple (multiply-encrypted) copies of the Microsoft Bob distribution image. It can’t be decrypted, but it’s there.
Here’s Dave Plummer (the guy who did it) talking all about it:
