This is the 2019 Top-10 Books Every Computer Scientist Must Read (with the number of votes for each book). All books are available at the TU Graz library, Inffeldgasse branch.
- George Orwell, 1984, 25
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 23
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 14
- George Orwell, Animal Farm, 13
- Stephen Hawkin, A Brief History of Time, 11
- Douglas Hofstaedter, Goedel, Escher, Bach, 11
- Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung, 9
- Randall Munroe, What if, 9
- Marc Elsberg, Blackout, 8
- Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 8
- Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, 8
Here is the list at Amazon.
What do we learn from this list? (1) We are one pessimistic bunch! Six out of eleven books are dystopian warnings: 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Blackout, Little Brother, Weapons of Math Destruction. We are lucky nobody thought of nominating Fahrenheit 451! If you want a positive spin on this – we are well aware of the dangers posed by Computer Science. (2) We like Science: A Brief History of Time, Logik der Forschung, and What If. (3) There is only one funny book. And I don’t think any normal people find it
funny.
What else? There are 11 books in the Top 10. (Including a trilogy in four parts.) Tastes don’t change much (5 books from 2004, 6 new.) Lord of the Rings and Die Verwandlung dropped most. I guess the movie didn’t help.
Statistics: 49 books nominated, 49 votes cast. Nine books were good enough to nominate but not good enough to vote for (including one book on working efficiently, I guess there was a belated lesson for the nominator in there).
Some comments from you (with answers from me):
- What shitty list is that? Where is my Sedgewick? My Stoustrup? My Knuth? My Kernighan-Ritchie? You must be kidding, you little Tolkien-critter, you… Ah, well, that must be because I explicitly ruled out textbooks, you nerd, you…
- This list is a mess/hard to read, please clean up the next time. 😉 Great idea. Want to help?
- Please keep this list somewhere. I often don’t know what to read and I think this list could solve this problem for a couple of years Here it is!