Books you reccomend?

[JackScott]

Hi everybody. I thought it might be interesting to discuss what we're reading at the moment, and what books we really like. We have a thread for OSDev books, so why not one for all the other sorts of books that there are? Here, follow my lead. At the moment I'm reading a C in a Nutshell (cover to cover ) and The Republic.

I suggest:

• Plato's The Republic - It's philosophy, and he's completely wrong, but it does underpin the rest of western philosophy for the last 2500 years.
• Enigma - An awesome novel about World War II encryption. It's fictional, but all the interesting snippets about ciphers & the enigma machine are all accurate.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything - Makes boring science much more interesting.

I want to read but haven't got around to yet:

• The Lord of the Rings
• Homer's The Iliad & The Odyssey - Because some guy on TV said I should.
• Tolstoy's War and Peace - The same reason.

[Alboin]

These are some books I'm reading. I'm not a very diligent reader. I'll read some part of a book, set it down, and finish it 6 months later.

• Modern Algebra by Seth Warner. (I really can't recommend this one, but it's cheap. )
• Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Sipser. Very good, albeit expensive.
• The Code Book by Singh. Interesting and cheap. (It's a historical look at cryptography.)
• Basic Concepts in Information Theory and Coding by GPS. A very strange book. It's written as a fictional tale of a spy. I believe it's out of print...

@Yayyak: The Odyssey is awesome. IMO, the end is one of the most classic in literary history.

[Zacariaz]

Well i dont really read much anymore (books are expensive), but there are a few books i really have enjoyed reading.

Charles Petzold: CODE
Jeff Hawkins: On Intelligense
Paul Hoffman: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
and then alot lot of those we all know: tolkien,king, koontz, etc.

[AndrewAPrice]

• Flatland - A romance of many dimensions (it's avaliable online, there are 2 movie adaptions of this book too)

and it's spin off books; Sphereland, The Planiverse, Flatterland, Spaceland, VAS: An Opera in Flatland.

[JackScott]

@Yayyak: The Odyssey is awesome. IMO, the end is one of the most classic in literary history.

Damn. Now I'm going to have to get around to reading it sooner!

Thanks for the suggestions guys. This is really interesting. Keep the books coming!