If, for nothing else, Programmers At Work has Bill Gates talking about dumpster diving for program listings.

The book is great - I love how Gary (IIRC) describes the centrality of data structures and how code kind of emerges from there.

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so-cal-schemer a day ago | parent | next [-]

Classic!

The 2nd part reminds me of another in my personal library:

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

by Wirth

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5191055M/Algorithms_data_str...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures...

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jan_m_savage 19 hours ago | parent [-]

How did Wirth's book benefit you?

Wirth writes fast but well.

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so-cal-schemer 19 hours ago | parent [-]

It was probably the first book on data structures and algorithms I came to possess (likely from a library book sale as a teen), so I would say I learned a lot from it, but don't remember the particulars. I remember it being clear and to the point, even though I didn't use Pascal, with good diagrams and nice printing. I read it as pseudocode.

It was a very compact hardcover edition that I could carry around easily in my backpack.

And it had a memorable title.

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getpost 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I loved that book! Fortran was the language used in my first programming class, and it was a revelation seeing program examples in the comparatively lucid PASCAL.

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so-cal-schemer 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah. I realize the book I carried everywhere was this one:

Data Structures and Algorithms

by Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3491774M/Data_structures_and...

but I own copies of both.

	▲	jan_m_savage 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks. Aho et al. was also given in Modula-3 which was perfect since Pascal-derived languages clearly motivate the why and the guts of the algos. C obscures them (too focused on pragmatism). Wirth's DS + A = P book was also written in Modula-2, a better, real-world language, and the writing was tightened. Still can be found if you know where to look. (I have a German edition cuz I wanted to hear the man say it in his native language-- btw, I am not German).

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drivers99 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

He writes about that and many other similar things in his recent autobiography of his younger years, "Source Code" (2025).