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Profession Jokes - Table of Contents

OK, OK. If you must have those programming languages books, here they are.

Ada Borland Delphi C C++ CGI Programming Cobol Eiffel Fortran

Java JavaScript Lisp Logo Modula 3 Pascal Pascal - Turbo Perl

PL/I Prolog QBasic REXX Smalltalk TCL VBA Visual Basic

The next books that I recommend here are thought provoking. Everyone will enjoy reading these books, but they have a special appeal for programmers, as they deal with the basic concepts of thought, logic and computer science.

A.K. Dewdney wrote for some years the monthly column "Computer Recreations" in Scientific American. The following three books are the collections of these columns.
Armchair Universe: An Exploration of Computer Worlds
The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery
The Tinkertoy Computer and Other MacHinations

The books discuss today's hottes and most fascinating topics of programming and computer science, including chaos, fractals, computer viruses and much more. Easy programming examples let you try many ideas on your home computer, from entertaining brain teasers to scientific applications.

Every programmer knows just one programming language, maybe two or three languages. Every programmer handles just one specific application. In these circumstances, what separates two programmers is greater than what unifies them. In Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing you will not learn any programming language, but you will encounter the common base to all the programming activity: the foundations of computer science.

In a very readable and attractive style, the book handles topics like the correctness and efficiency of algorithms, the limitations of computer ability to compute, and algorithmics and intelligence. The book is packed with vivid examples, from the Monkey Puzzle to the Towers of Hanoi. Take a break from reading those boring Office 97 manuals, and read this charming and enlightening book.

A short time after Douglas Hofstadter published his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, I went to my local bookstore and asked the bookseller where can I find the book. Her answer: "A book about Escher you can find at the art department, a book about Bach is in the music department, but who is Gödel?" This book, described by Mathematics Magazine as "a brilliant, creative and very personal synthesis without precedent or peer in modern literature," creates a coherent masterpiece out of the work of those three so different geniuses.

In this book you will find the basic concepts of mathematical logic and the foundations of computer science, introduced in the most charming way possible. Achilles and the tortoise, the legendary heroes of Zenon's paradox, come to new life in witty conversations that they make after each chapter of the book. If you are very short of time, read just these conversations.

For two and half years Douglas Hofstadter wrote a monthly column in Scientific American. The book Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern is a collection of these columns. The book spans on a vast area of topics, from Rubik's cube to the design of fonts and from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to Turing's test.

Every chapter is written from a very original viewpoint, and contains brilliant ideas, interesting knowledge and pure fun. If you plan to read this year just one book, this is the book for you. Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of the chapter "On Number Numbness", which discusses our ability to understand numerical information.

Are kids able to learn how to write computer programs? Should they realize this ability? If your answers to these questions are 'yes', Logo is that best programming language to start with. If your answer to any of these questions is 'no', The Great Logo Adventure: Discovering Logo On and Off the Computer will change your mind. Logo, a powerful interactive programming language, is described as a programming language with no threshold and no ceiling. The same description is valid to this book, that reflects gradually all of Logo's power.

The book starts at the very beginning, and proceeds with recursion, mathematics, list processing, animation and even multimedia programming. The combination of Logo and this book is the best way for a first encounter with programming. And if you are an experienced Cobol or C++ programmer, you will find it as an enjoyable language, a language that lets you focus on your ideas instead on language techniques. The book includes a CD-ROM with a Logo interpreter for MS-Windows.

The hard disk has crashed? Windows drives you crazy? Dave Barry in Cyberspace has the solution to your problems. Take a break from the computer, read Dave Barry's survival guide and you will believe that the computer is a really funny machine. If you hate your hardware, your operating systems or your application software -- read this book and you will find that you are not alone and that laugh is better than hate. Don't wait to the movie -- read this book now!

If you didn't find any interesting book in my recommendations, you can start here a search in the whole catalog of Amazon.com, Earth's Biggest Bookstore. Write the name of the author or the name of the book you wish to find, and click on the "Search" button.