Suggested Reading: Algorithms for Memory Hierarchies

Ulrich Meyer, Peter Sanders, Jop Sibeyn (eds.) — Algorithms for Memory Hierarchies — Springer, (Lectures Notes on Computer Science LNCS # 2625), 2003, 428 pp. ISBN 978-3540-00883-5

(Buy at Amazon.com)

This book is a collection of chapters on various topics pertaining to memory hierarchies and their algorithms, but written by several different authors, without any special uniformity in tone or topics; but that’s OK because it allows the reader to have a broad view of algorithms for memory hierarchies.

Suggested Reading: Advanced Data Structures

Peter Brass — Advanced Data Structures — Cambridge University Press, 2008, 492 pp. ISBN 978-0521-88037-4

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The first part of the book concentrates on search trees and variants, whether balanced trees, interval trees, or heaps. Chapters are dedicated to connected components and like algorithms, one to algorithms for strings, and one for hash tables. Follows appendices on computation, cache oblivious algorithms, etc.

Suggested Readings:The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters

Christoph Niemann — The Pet Dragon: A story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters — Greenwillow Books, 2008, 40 pp. ISBN 978-006-157776-5

(Buy at Amazon.com)

I greatly appreciate Niemann’s graphic style. He’s original and kept his playful side. This short book—a kids’ book—is full of his odd poetry and graphic genius. The Pet Dragon is built around the analogies between what we can imagine chinese character represents and pictograms. A short à la Petit Prince story, just a lot less pretentious.

The book’s website
The author’s website.

Suggested Reading:Three Cups of Tea

Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin — Three Cups of Tea: One Man mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time — Penguin Books, 2007, 349 pp. ISBN 978-014-303825-2

(Buy at Amazon.com)

This book tells us about Greg Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in remote corners of Afghanistan and Pakistan, starting with how he fell in love with this country after having lost is way down the K2. Rescued by poor but generous villagers, Mortenson, deeply touched, set himself to help them in any way he could; finally to decide upon bringing education to these people, and especially to girls and women.

This book is a great lesson of humanity; an inspiring “fix the world” story.

The book’s.

Suggested Reading: La Nouvelle Grammaire en Tableaux

Marie-Éva de Villiers — La Nouvelle Grammaire en Tableaux et Recueil de Conjugaison — Québec Amérique, 2009, 324 pp. ISBN 978-2-7644-0690-8

(Buy at Amazon.com)

Normally, I suggest English books, but since I know a certain part of my lectorate is French-speaking, I will make, now and then, an exception.

Un ouvrage de référence indispensable s’il en est un. Ce guide de la grammaire Française en plus d’être le plus à jour, a la particularité d’être très clair et complet; comme son titre le laisse entendre, l’information est présentée par tableaux, du genre if-then-else, chacun d’une grande simplicité mais aussi très complet. Pour comprendre l’usage du subjonctif plus-que-parfait (dont l’usage rare se fait trop souvent le prétexte aux phrases phonétiquement ambiguës — et aux farces salées) il suffit de consulter le tableau « concordance des temps dans la phrase. » Des néologismes ? Aucun problème ! Consultez le guide d’usage et de formation des néologismes.

Une lecture obligatoire pour tout bloggueur, thésard ou communicateur!

(hit Google Translate for fun)

Suggested Reading:The LATEX Companion

Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens, Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, Chris Rowley — The LATEX Companion — 2^nd ed, Addison Wesley, 2006, 1090 pp. ISBN 0-201-36299-6

(Buy at Amazon)

I should have told you about this book a long time ago. The LaTeX Companion is the definitive guide to LaTeX, ideal for anyone using it on a daily basis (or almost, as I do) or anyone wanting to learn LaTex. LaTeX is a complex and sophisticated mark-up language aimed at producing better typography for mathematics and scientific work—in which it totally succeeds. As for Linux, LaTeX (and TeX) comes in many distributions, some more geared toward the humanities, other for science, and still other for exquisite “art” typesetting.

A must read for graduate students.

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On the web:

• Latex for Humans
• The Beauty of LaTeX
• The IRC channel #latex on irc.freenode.net

Suggested Reading: The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives

Leonard Mlodinow — The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives — Vintage, 2008, 252 pp. ISBN 978-0-307-27517-2

(Buy at Amazon.com)

For those who are interested in (but not already familiar with) probabilities and statistics, I would most certainly recommand this book. Mlodinow presents the basic concepts of probability and statistics by concrete everyday examples—and visually, whenever possibile, rather than through classical mathematical notation. He discusses psychological factors that make us so bad at estimating probabilities and understanding statistics. The concepts he presents are deep but the style is fluid and makes The Drunkard’s Walk an easy read.

[…]the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirms it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken.

Francis Bacon, 1620

Suggested Reading:The UNIX-HATERS Handbook

Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassman — The UNIX-HATERS Handbook International Data Group, 1994, 360. pp ISBN 1-56884-203-1

(Download, free)

This is one of the funniest piece of UNIX literature I have come across in a very long time. This book makes thoroughly fun of all the bizarre quirks and general user hostile friendly unfriendliness of Unix and all the stupid things the unexperimented (and sometimes experimented) users can do. Full of FUD and stupidity, this is a classic must read.

Not unrelated: Linux Hater’s Blog.

Suggested Reading: One Hundred Essential Things You Didn’t Know you Didn’t Know: Maths Explains Your World

John D. Barrow — One Hundred Essential Things You Didn’t Know you Didn’t Know: Maths Explains Your World — Norton, 2008, 284 pp. ISBN 978-0-393-07007-1

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This isn’t really a math book; there’s hardly any real math, it’s rather a book about math, or maybe more a book about math in our daily lives, more precisely about things that are indeed solved by maths in our daily lives. The reader needn’t a very high level of knowledge about mathematics to enjoy the read. If it contains several little gems¹, it also contains a number of chapters (as each of the 100 things you didn’t know you didn’t know is presented in a standalone chapter) that aren’t all that interesting. Still very much worth the read, though.

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¹ One I like particularly is the trick proposed by von Neumann to transform a biased coin into a fair coin. Let’s say we have a coin that lands on head with probability and on tail with probability (both quite far from ). Von Neumann observes that if you throw the coin twice, it will land twice on heads with probability , twice on tails with probability . But head followed by tail and tail followed by head have the same probability of . The quantity isn’t , but if each time we throw two consecutive heads or tails we “forget” them, keeping only the draws with one head and one tail (HT or TH), we get an unbiased, or fair, coin. Suffice to map HT to heads and TH to tails (or vice-versa) and we’re done.

Suggested Reading: The Big Book of Irony

Jon Winokur — The Big Book of Irony — St-Martin’s Press, 2007, 174 pp. ISBN 978-0-312-35483-1

(Buy at Amazon.com)

Winokur gives us the complete irony guide; from verbal irony—the most frequent one, when someone says something while clearly meaning the exact opposite—to auto-irony passing by morrisettian irony (irony mistook for coincidence or something else). You’ll learn a great deal about irony. Plenty of à propos quotes. Not exactly a book for the beach, but not very serious either.