I don't like this article. Lots of people do a Google-search on books on various topics, then publish a blog article without having read them. I'm seeing books in there that are awful choices.
And oh look, the Amazon articles are tagged, which means the author gets affiliate compensations. And what do you know, it's the hollyday season, so people buy stuff on Amazon.
And don't get me wrong, I'm fine with that, I did it myself, but at least read the freaking books that you're recommending, before recommending them.
>"I'm seeing books in there that are awful choices."
At the very least, you could mention which and why.
There's a hell of a lot more value in...
"The ZINC experiment: an economical implementation of the ML language is a technical report, written by Xavier Leroy (author of OCaml) in 1990th, and it contains pretty detailed description of ML-like language implementation. This report could be very interesting for all who wants to know about internals of Caml & OCaml languages."
...x 132 from someone who may or may or may not have actually read what's linked than a simple "awful" without any context or qualification.
I mean, you could have just dropped a link to your own site and added something of value, instead of creating a nonsense tangent of accusation:
I've stated my opinion, I mentioned that I did it myself, placing affiliate tags on book links (in the comment you're replying to), no I didn't want to draw attention to my own blog because it would have been off-topic and yes, I gave explanations in this same thread.
What you're doing is a direct ad-hominem btw. I don't need qualifications to infer that it's impossible for somebody to read 132 books on some of the hardest topics in CS. We also have different definitions for what "value" is.
Can you please call out which books are bad though? That's some very useful information. I know I've read books that were garbage that are very highly recommended. (Code Complete as a "guide to the craft of programming", for example is extremely poor when compared to The Pragmatic Programmer). And even if I disagree with your judgements in some cases, it's good for calibration.
Seriously, you've read 132 technical books, for 10 different languages, going back to 2009?
(2) I'm seeing books that have been OK-ish when they appeared and thus recommended by people, either because of lack of other choices, but also because the advice contained was the status quo, but right now are pretty bad choices. "Programming Scala", by Alex Payne, for example is an awful reference to put on any list of books for Scala. It contains bad practices, plus lots of references to obsolete parts of the standard library, not to mention its general flow is just awful. If you would have read it, you would have known. "Programming Scala" the one published by the Pragmatic Programmers, is another awful choice. Actually, all books on Scala published before 2010 are awful choices.
(3) What the hell does a book on Scalatra has to do with Functional Programming? Is it because the association with Scala or something?
(4) It's bad advice to tell people to buy books from Amazon. The E-Books are DRM-enabled Kindle versions, sometimes badly formated and you don't get the PDF. Many of those books have the same price if you buy straight from their publishers and you get both a DRM-free Kindle version and the PDF.
Lets do the math - this isn't fiction we're talking about, it takes at least 2 weeks to read a technical book and this is assuming you can read at least 1 or several chapters per day, or maybe skipping chapters, which can't happen for many of those books, as some of them are pretty challenging and you have to think about what you're reading, you have to try out samples, you have to do extra reading to clarify stuff and so on.
But lets be generous and say that 2 weeks is the average for reading a technical book. And there are on average 52 weeks in a year.
132 * 2 / 52 = 5.08
So that's 5 years worth of book reading, assuming that (a) you're reading each and every single day, without exceptions, without breaks and (b) that you aren't reading anything else. Why the heck won't you admit that you haven't read some of them and simply pasted links based on Amazon's recommendations or something?
Also, the section on recommendations is shallow. It references books for getting started, after which it gives advice to continue with the books above. And I'm not seeing negative remarks on the referenced books at all. Everybody has opinions on whether a book was good or not. What kind of review doesn't do that?
"Functional Programming in Scala" is an awesome book on functional programming btw. You should put that as a recommended book.
It doesn't take two weeks to read a technical book that covers material you already know. I have no opinion on the site's reviews, but it's completely possible to read hundreds of very technical books, as long as the material overlaps.
I at least briefly went through the almost all books before putting them into list (not counting early releases). It's not required to read every word in the book to understand what's in it.
I've heard about "FP in Scala" and it's loaded into my kindle prepared for vacation (together with many other)...
And oh look, the Amazon articles are tagged, which means the author gets affiliate compensations. And what do you know, it's the hollyday season, so people buy stuff on Amazon.
And don't get me wrong, I'm fine with that, I did it myself, but at least read the freaking books that you're recommending, before recommending them.