Letter to a former student

Here's some advice I wrote to a former student who is headed into software development. Can anyone add to or improve my comments?

1) software development in general

The Mythical Man Month (overrated, in my view, but everyone in the industry has read it)

Joel Spolsky on Software (a successful entrepreneur who has a big following in the developer community; he has an extensive web site)

Paul Graham (a CS PhD who writes about software and startups; very opinionated; check out his web site)


2) algorithms

The standard text is Rivest et al., but for an informal introduction to some of the best stuff in CS try The Turing Omnibus. For security and crypto, try Applied Cryptography by Schneier. Knuth's books on the art of computer programming are probably mainly of academic interest, but you might enjoy a look.


3) general

Anyone in the working world should read How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie -- I swear by it. There is an outline of the whole book on my blog somewhere :-)


4) miscellaneous comments

Unix shell tools are amazingly powerful and will serve you time and again -- grep, piping, awk, sed, emacs, etc. Many Windows programmers are unfamiliar with these and are blown away by their power to do quick and dirty stuff.

The more you know the more effective you become -- experienced programmers think a lot before they code, and they tend to reuse existing code or libraries.

Don't forget to think like a physicist -- get to the heart of the problem before starting in any direction; make quick and dirty models and test them out; test your assumptions throughout the process by checking against the accumulating evidence. After you have a feel for the problem spend some time generalizing about or abstracting from what you've done.