Books Recommended by Alan Kay
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Art in the Blood
A Sherlock Holmes Adventure
Bonnie MacBird
Source: "[My wife] completely nailed the Arthur Conan Doyle voice of the characters and narrative, while being able to carry a marvelous story into the much larger realm of the novel." - Alan Kay
LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual
John McCarthy
Source: "I have called this the 'Maxwell’s Equations' of computing, because it presents a very large part of what’s important about programming languages." - Alan Kay
Computation
Finite and Infinite Machines
Marvin Lee Minsky
Source: "It is actually a 'math book' — with lots of ideas, theorems, proofs, etc., — but presented in the friendliest way imaginable by a great mind." - Alan Kay
Molecular Biology of the Cell
Bruce Alberts
Source: "For many years it has been the best single volume narrative of 'life from scratch.'" - Alan Kay
Advances in Programming and Non-Numerical Computation
L Fox
Source: "One of the books that Bob Barton had us read in his famous advanced systems design class in 1967." - Alan Kay
The Principia
The Authoritative Translation and Guide: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Isaac Newton
Source: "I have never forgotten the combined shock and thrill of making my way through this in my 20s." - Alan Kay
The Mythical Man-Month
Essays on Software Engineering
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Source: "An early look and experience with timeless truths (and gotchas) from systems building with teams" - Alan Kay
The Sciences of the Artificial
Herbert A Simon
Source: "A much stronger way to think about computing — and what 'Computer Science' might mean." - Alan Kay
The Art of the Metaobject Protocol
Gregor Kiczales
Source: "A real gem for helping to think about design and implementations." - Alan Kay
A Programming Language
Kenneth E. Iverson
Source: "This has the same thought expanding properties of Lisp." - Alan Kay
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6 books