Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book

[pozorvlak]

Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. (Groucho Marx)

One of my favourite entries in my list of email signatures is the following quotation:

A really good, readable textbook/manual is worth its weight in very, very, very nice coffee.
   -- Tim Sweetman

A while ago, my sigmonster included this at the end of an email to my flatmate, who responded

There is not such a thing as very, very, very nice coffee.
There isn't probably such a thing as a good, readable textbook/manual, either.

Now, the first bit is just because he's a Philistine and doesn't drink coffee :-). But how about the second bit? This made me think about which books, exactly, deserve that description.

In computing, the book against which I measure all others is Wall, Christiansen and Orwant's Programming Perl. It's witty, erudite, clear and thought-provoking - it explains the hairy details of the Perl interpreter's inner workings by making puns in Anglo-Saxon, for goodness' sake, and somehow this is the perfect explanation. But my favourite bit has to be the explanation of the regex engine in terms of The Little Engine that Could :-). Never afraid to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, it's had a real effect on the way I think about programming. And it's incredibly comprehensive.

Coming in a close second has to be Knuth's The TeXBook, for all the same reasons. As for other books... well, K&R, obviously, and possibly Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language. And I'd like to mention Scott Meyers' Effective C++ series, although it had the opposite effect on me from that intended: it made me decide that any language which forced you to think about this arcane rubbish was clearly not ready for prime-time. Paul Graham's On Lisp also looks pretty good, but I haven't read the whole thing. Then again, I've only read about half of the TeXBook, so what the hell. The BBC Basic manual was pretty good. The Gang of Four book is mind-expanding, as well as being clear and readable, and Martin Fowler's Refactoring, though lighter-weight, deserves a mention. And I'd like to give an honourable mention to Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design: Applied Generic and Design Patterns, which (though the depth precludes its being clear and readable enough to make the cut) is simply mindblowing.

In maths, there don't seem to be so many good candidates. Halmos' Naive Set Theory. Birkhoff and MacLane's Survey of Modern Algebra. Ian Anderson's Introduction to Combinatorial Mathematics (though it's a bit too short). Maybe Apostol's book on analysis. Derek Holton's Problem Solving series, if they count as textbooks. Maybe Borceux's Handbook of Categorical Algebra. Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician I exclude for the same reason as Modern C++ Design: it's simply too dense to be easily readable. I had an excellent book on group theory written by someone with a German-sounding surname, possibly beginning with W, but I gave it away and can't find it on Amazon. Not that I'm biased, but Wilson Sutherland's Introduction to Topological and Metric Spaces is great. Tom Leinster's book Higher Operads, Higher Categories (which probably shouldn't count as a textbook) is if anything too readable: I often find I've read several pages but haven't really engaged with the meaning.

I suppose it's been eight years since I used textbooks for any other subjects, but I'm surprised I can't remember good textbooks from before that. I remember my history textbook from when I was about 12, which covered a period on a double page - the left-hand page was facts, and the right-hand page was a description of the time by a fictional typical character of that period. But that's it.

Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention Charlie Dancey's truly excellent Encyclopaedia of Ball Juggling :-) EDIT: And Lofty Wiseman's SAS Survival Handbook, and Geoffrey Budworth's The Knot Book. And How to Hold a Crocodile :-). Divers readers (thanks, everyone!) have left recommendations for textbooks on topics ranging from criminal law to pharmacology, and from electronics to adult movie-making - see the comments.
So, I turn it over to you. What are your favourites? What textbooks do you think are worth their weight in very, very, very nice coffee? :-)

Comments

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I fear I may be cheating. But then, however really really nice your coffee may be, it still won't agree with me.

If (like totherme) you're medically unable to drink coffee, then of course you are to be pitied rather than censured. Philipp has no such excuse, however :-)

I've never read the "not-so-short guide", but I've heard good things about it. It can't fail to be better than Lamport's patronising and uninformative manual.

Ueno: I'll try and remember that for when I eventually have to learn some alg. geom. - it's on the "I really ought to know about that" list, but there are other things that are higher. Thanks!

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Well, I made myself intolerant by drinking too much. I don't know if that makes me `medically unable' to drink it, and I can drink a little occasionally, but more than that makes me feel ill.

I've not read the not-so-short guide as such, I just use it for reference as I go along (my method for learning latex having been: nick someone else's headers, get started, off we go!). It has a good index and is sometimes more helpful than googling. It has good tables of symbols, arrows, etc. Oh and if you haven't learnt xy-pic yet, it gets you going on that, though sadly doesn't tell you how to move arrows to the side a bit (so you can have one either direction; I just learnt how to do this; very pretty).

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

OK, that's definitely a case of pity rather than censure.

XY-Pic: I'm a higher-dimensional category theorist, of course I've learned how to use XY-Pic :-) Well, I suppose I could have learned one of the half-dozen other commutative diagrams packages instead. I mostly learned from the XY-Pic manuals, which are almost as ghastly as the package itself.

[neoanjou.livejournal.com]

I use the not-so-short guide in much the same way.

I'm so happy that I went to an Astronomy summer camp and learnt ... well, not to use LaTeX but how not-to-be-scared by it - has set me so well for every time I've ever had to do sciency stuff.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I was introduced to Plain TeX at the age of about 17 by my father. I think on balance that that was a good thing, but it's made me very impatient with LaTeX's nannying attitude :-)

["Why don't you just go back to using Plain TeX?" I hear you cry. Well, maybe I will. I'm trying to give LaTeX a decent chance, though. Besides, my uni's standard PhD stylesheet is IIRC LaTeX-only.]