Top 10 lists

Classic texts in computer science. Worth reading for the sheer insight.

Update: The link didn’t seem to work in Feb 2007. Here’s the list.

• An axiomatic basis for computer programming by C. A. R. Hoare
• Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) by C. A. R. Hoare
• Call-by-name, call-by-value, and the lambda calculus by Gordon Plotkin
• Towards a theory of type structure by John C. Reynolds
• Definitional interpreters for higher-order programming languages by John C. Reynolds
• An APL Machine 1970 by Philip S. Abrams
• Henry Baker’s Archive of Research Papers (many classic Lisp papers)
• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engin by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
• No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering by Frederic P. Brooks, Jr.
• A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon
• Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon
• Bayesian Networks without Tears by Eugene Charniak
• A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression by Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel
• A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks 1970 by Edgar F. Codd
• Let’s Build a Compiler 1988-1995 by Jack Crenshaw
• Gauging Similarity via N-Grams: Language-Independent Sorting, Categorization, and Retrieval of Text by Marc Damashek
• Worse Is Better by Richard P. Gabriel
• Hints on Programming Language Design by C.A.R. Hoare
• Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes
• The Design of APL by Kenneth E. Iverson
• The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay
• Computer Programming as an Art by Donald E. Knuth
• The next 700 programming languages by Peter J. Landin
• Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I) 1960 by John McCarthy
• FORTH – A Language for Interactive Computing by Charles H.Moore
• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years 2001 by Peter Norvig
• Parenthetically Speaking, a collection of essays from the 1990s by Kent M. Pitman
• The Definition and Implementation of a Computer Language based on constraints by Guy Lewis Steele Jr.
• Growing a Language by Guy Lewis Steele Jr.
• Epigrams on Programming by Alan J. Perlis
• The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures by Stephen A. Cook
• Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence by Marvin Minsky
• The Original ‘Lambda Papers’ by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman
• A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems by R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman
• The UNIX Time-Sharing System by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

• How To Set Up Azureus
• Automatically download your favourite TV shows
• Totally Anonymous Azureus
• Tips for speeding up your torrents
• Make your own torrent with Azureus
• Using BitTorrent to send files
• Download public domain movies
• Huge list of BitTorrent sites
• Encrypting BitTorrent traffic
• Top Azureus plugins
• What do Mickey Mouse, Lars Ulrich, and Mr. Rogers all have in common?
• Protecting yourself against BitTorrent bandits

The Personal MBA. John Kaufman says reading (and practicing) these 42 books should be as good as any MBA (and that an MBA is, perhaps excessively, expensive). Some of these books are worth a read in any case.

Master Yourself

• Mastery by George Leonard
• Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton

Manage Your Life and Work

• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Learn the Fundamentals

• What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
• Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business by Ram Charan

Strategic Thinking

• On Competition by Michael Porter
• Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne

The Only Thing Constant is Change

• Seeing What’s Next by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony
• Re-imagine by Tom Peters

Masters of Management

• The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
• First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman

The Finest Minds in Business

• The Essays of Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett & Lawrence Cunningham
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger & Peter Kaufman

Dollars on the Books

• The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Finance for Nonfinancial Managers by Robert A. Cooke
• Essentials of Accounting, 8th edition by Robert Anthony, Leslie Pearlman

Numbers and Negotiations

• How to Read a Financial Report by John A. Tracy
• Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton

Operational Effectiveness

• The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt & Jeff Cox
• Lean Thinking by James Womack & Daniel Jones

Form and Function

• The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

Project Management and Marketing

• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun
• The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula & Richard Tong

Do Your Own Thing

• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin

Speak Your Mind

• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• Flawless Consulting by Peter Block

The Delicate Art of Human Relations

• How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

Sell, Sell, Sell!

• The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

Economics and Worldviews

• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• The Economist

Businesses, Past and Present

• American Business, 1920-2000 by Thomas McCraw, John Franklin, A. S. Eisenstadt
• Brand New by Nancy F. Koehn

Rules and Morals

• Law 101 by Jay M. Feinman
• A Primer on Business Ethics by Tibor Machan & James Chesher

Analyze This

• The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
• Principles of Statistics by M.G. Bulmer

Voices of Experience

• The Little Book of Business Wisdom by Peter Krass (Editor)
• Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management by Bill Swanson

These are the Pulitzer prize winning non-fiction books. I’ve read only two: Godel, Escher, Bach and Guns, Germs and Steel. These were the very best books I have EVER read. If that’s any indication to go by, I want to finish this whole list.

• 1962: The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore H White
• 1963: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
• 1964: Anti-intellectualism in America by Richard Hofstadter
• 1965: O Strange New World by Howard M Jones
• 1966: Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale
• 1967: The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis
• 1968: Rousseau & Revolution Story of CIV Volume 10 by Will Durant
• 1969: Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
• 1970: Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence by Erik H Erikson
• 1971: The Rising Sun by John Toland
• 1972: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 by Barbara W. Tuchman
• 1973: Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald
• 1974: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
• 1975: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
• 1976: Why Survive?: Being Old in America by Robert N Butler
• 1977: Beautiful Swimmers by William W Warner
• 1978: Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
• 1979: On Human Nature by Edward Osborne Wilson
• 1980: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• 1981: Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl Schorske
• 1982: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
• 1983: Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan
• 1984: The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr
• 1985: The Good War: An Oral History of World War II by Studs Terkel
• 1986: Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas
• 1987: Arab and Jew by David K Shipler
• 1988: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
• 1989: A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan
• 1990: And Their Children After Them by Michael Williamson
• 1991: Ants by Bert Holldobler
• 1992: Prize by Daniel Yergin
• 1993: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills
• 1994: Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick
• 1995: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner
• 1996: The Haunted Land by Tina Rosenberg
• 1997: Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger
• 1998: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
• 1999: The Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
• 2000: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower
• 2001: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix
• 2002: Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter
• 2003: A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power
• 2004: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum
• 2005: Ghost Wars by Steve Coll

I end up changing my office laptops every year or so, and hence reinstall lots of software. Here’s my inventory.

I most certainly will install the following.
ActivePerl. I still program. I know Perl. I love Perl.
Acrobat Reader
BitLord
DivX player
Dave’s quicksearch deskbar
Microsoft Office 2003. Has some really good improvements over Office 2000.
NoteTab Light. Multiple tabs notepad. But is there anything better?
Nero Express
Picasa 2
WinAmp (with Media Library import/export)
WinRar
WinZip

I most likely will install the following, but not necessarily.
Adobe Photoshop. Almost vital, but I can live with Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
Goldwave. I often record interviews, or give commentary for home-made movies.
Google Earth (with Fraps). To browse the world and make movies out of them.
Google Toolbar
Mozilla Firefox. For multi-tabbed browsing, mainly. Otherwise, IE is fine.
MSN Messenger. Just for the interface. Somehow, it feels “smoother” than Yahoo.
RealPlayer. Don’t listen to RealAudio that much. Still…
UnixUtils. I use “grep” and “less” more often than “dir”
VirtualDub. For the occasional movie editing that Microsoft Movie Maker can’t handle.
WinHtTrack. To browse offline.
Google Desktop Search. Helps remember my browsing history.

Tempting, but no thanks.
Opera. Mozilla’s fine, thank you.
Yahoo Messenger. MSN Messenger’s better, thank you.
Yahoo Desktop Search. Better interface than Google’s. But no browsing history.

Inspired post by Aashish on the top 10 hindi movies ever.

1. Sholay
2. Lagaan
3. Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge
4. Anand
5. Deewar
6. Roja
7. Aandhi
8. Golmaal
9. Khamoshi
10. Pyaar to Hona Hi Tha