This weekend was another book sale, this time over at our other local library. It’s a smaller library and fairly new – I wasn’t expecting much. There were only about 10 smallish tables of books, so I was quite surprised to find quite a cache of computer science books on a chair in the corner. Of course, there were the usual “Learn VB6 with a book the size of your head” and “NT admin’s pro reference” type books, but in between those, I managed to get, at a dollar each:
- Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest)
- Computer Organization & Design (Hennessy & Patterson)
- Modern Operating Systems (Tanenbaum)
- Fundamentals of Data Structures in C (Horowitz, Sahni, Anderson-Freed)
- An Introduction to Database Systems (Date)
- Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools (Aho, Sethi & Ullman)
- Compiler Design in C (Holub)
Quite the haul there! Including several from my CS reading list of ~14 years ago. But good CS, like maths, doesn’t really date. Talking of maths, I also picked up a couple of 1950s texts: Analytical Geometry and Calculus and Trigonometry: Plane and Spherical, both by Lloyd L Smail.
Lucky you! I’d especially like to have Tanenbaum and the Dragon Book sitting on my bookshelf. Cormen et.al is also a good find, although not quite a good introductory text it’s invaluable as a reference.
Talking of 50s textbooks, I recently found a Schaum’s Outlines ‘First Year College Mathematics’ from ’58. Still quite handy at times.