r/compsci · 2020

Most-mentioned books in r/compsci during 2020

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/compsci within the published source unit for 2020. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

Books ranked

Tracked mentions in 2020

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Harold Abelson

Six chapters into Scheme, you're writing an interpreter for a language you invented an hour ago.

9 in 2020

Introduction to Algorithms

Thomas H. Cormen

A course syllabus gets posted, and a Redditor recognizes it as nothing but this book's chapter headings in disguise.

7 in 2020

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Charles Petzold

Charles Petzold builds a working computer from a doorbell, a flashlight, and a length of wire, then keeps going until it's running software.

6 in 2020

The Art of Computer Programming

Donald E. Knuth

Four volumes of algorithms and combinatorics Donald Knuth started in 1962 and still hasn't finished, cited more often than it's actually read.

5 in 2020

Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective

Randal E. Bryant

The machine underneath the machine: assembly, memory, and the OS layer that 'just learn C' never actually explains.

3 in 2020

Grokking Algorithms

Aditya Y. Bhargava

A cartoon-illustrated walkthrough of binary search, sorting, and graphs aimed at people who bounced off Introduction to Algorithms.

3 in 2020

Modern Operating Systems

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

A 1,000-page walkthrough of how an operating system actually works, kept on the shelf for the week before a systems interview.

3 in 2020

The C Programming Language

Brian W. Kernighan

Two authors write the book that becomes 'K&R,' and forty years later Reddit still uses it as shorthand for programmers who had to know everything themselves.

3 in 2020

Code Complete

Steve McConnell

Steve McConnell's seven-hundred-page argument that construction, not design or testing, is where most software quality is actually won or lost.

2 in 2020

#10

Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach

James F. Kurose

The book people cite when they're tired of the acronyms and want to know what actually happens between their laptop and a server.

2 in 2020

#11

Effective Java

Joshua Bloch

Joshua Bloch turns fifty-plus Java gotchas into itemized rules, and one of them — favor composition over inheritance — outgrew the book entirely.

2 in 2020

#12

Eloquent JavaScript

Marijn Haverbeke

Marijn Haverbeke's free JavaScript book teaches closures and recursion, then has its own author admit he wouldn't wish a game-programming career on anyone.

2 in 2020

#13

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Christopher M. Bishop

Chris Bishop opens with Bayes' theorem and doesn't let go until three hundred pages of matrices later you understand why a neural network is really just curve-fitting with priors.

2 in 2020

#14

The C++ Programming Language

Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup writes the reference manual for the language he invented, and on Reddit it mostly survives as one joke about languages nobody complains about.

2 in 2020

#15

The Linux Programming Interface

Michael Kerrisk

A process calls fork(), a child boots into exec(), and roughly 1500 pages explain exactly what the kernel just did underneath both calls.

2 in 2020

#16

Clean Code

Robert C. Martin

Robert Martin's case that unreadable functions are a discipline failure, not an inevitability, argued one renamed variable and one extracted method at a time.

1 in 2020

#17

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow

Aurélien Géron

Aurélien Géron's scikit-learn-to-TensorFlow book that data scientists recommend and interviewers weaponize in the same threads.

1 in 2020

#18

Python Crash Course

Eric Matthes

A high school teacher gets tired of Python resources that assume too much, so he writes the one that doesn't.

1 in 2020

#19

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim

A struggling IT VP inherits a doomed project, a company on the edge of collapse, and one coworker who has quietly become the company's entire bottleneck.

1 in 2020

#20

The Pragmatic Programmer

Andy Hunt

Two working programmers write down the shop habits senior engineers use so junior ones stop reinventing them badly.

1 in 2020

#21

The Unicorn Project

Gene Kim

A senior engineer gets exiled to a doomed payroll project and finds a rogue skunkworks team racing to save the company's flagship app before the deadline kills it.

1 in 2020

#22

Think Like a Programmer

V. Anton Spraul

You know exactly what your budget app should do and still can't make yourself start typing; V. Anton Spraul wrote the book that breaks that freeze into steps.

1 in 2020