Abstraction and specification in program development

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1. rramadassJun 2023
   The book is by the great Barbara Liskov herself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov) the pioneer of Abstract Data Types, Subtyping, OOD etc. It is basically a rewrite of their classic text Abstraction and Specification in Program Development (1986) with the example language now being Java. It is not a popular cookbook but a fundamental programming concepts book which needs serious study. I highly recommend it.
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2. RNeffApr 2020
   Sorry, you are new to Computer Science. Undergraduate CS only covers a couple of percent of the topic. Do you know distributed systems, machine learning, robotics, image processing, concurrency, NLP, programming language design, hardware design, computer architecture, software engineering, program verification, security, databases, computer graphics, computer history? Probably not.

   Read : Abstraction and Specification in Program Development, then read all four volumes of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. There are lots of courses on EdX, and MIT Open courseware.

   Undergraduate CS is just the start, a tiny beginning.

   The university is the best place to find a girl friend/ boy fried. Also a great place to make long term friends.

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3. abecedariusJul 2017
   Thinking Forth; Software Tools; SICP; Abstraction and Specification in Program Development; Essentials of Programming Languages; Paradigms of AI Programming; I'd like to list something about OO too, but no book I know really measures up to learning from other programmers. But there's Mark S. Miller's thesis Robust Composition.

   (in roughly chronological order. As you can see from the chronology, it took me a long time to start to like OOP.)

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4. abecedariusDec 2012
   I wouldn't even recommend the first couple from my list, today -- e.g. there are surely better intros to algorithms now. But here's an approximate top 5 for changing my programming when I read them.

   Brodie, Thinking Forth

   Sedgewick, Algorithms

   Abelson & Sussman, SICP

   Liskov & Guttag, Abstraction and Specification in Program Development

   Norvig, PAIP

   It's hard to stick to 5!

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5. abecedariusDec 2010
   I don't know of any books that sound exactly right for you, but here are a couple I like that are relevant. You might find them kind of advanced right now:

   * Chapter 3 of http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ -- also chapters 1 and 2.

   * _Abstraction and Specification in Program Development_, on design by contract. There's a newer book by the same authors, _Program Development in Java_, but Norman Ramsey says it's not as good. (I've only read the older one.) By Liskov & Guttag. Focuses on abstract datatypes rather than OOP classic. Bertrand Meyer's _Object-Oriented Software Construction_ covers much of the same material, but not as well to my taste in the bits I dipped into.

   * Also, _Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation_ at http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/64 -- this might be more basic than the above two. The ideas were old to me by the time I got to it, so I don't know how well it'd work for a novice.

   * I've seen _A Little Smalltalk_ recommended as an intro to OO and it looks plausible: http://www.littlesmalltalk.org/index.php?page=the-book -- I haven't read it myself.

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6. binomialNov 2010
   Reposting a dead post which should not have been dead, from abecedarius:

       These had high I-want-to-read-itosity, I thought:
       Abelson and diSessa, Turtle Geometry
       Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
       Aho and Weinberger and Kernighan, The AWK Programming Language
       Andrew Appel, Compiling With Continuations
       Jon Bentley, More Programming Pearls
       Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls
       Leo Brodie, Thinking FORTH
       W. H. Burge, Recursive Programming Techniques
       Carriero and Gelernter, How to Write Parallel Programs
       A. K. Dewdney, The New Turing Omnibus
       Edsger Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming
       Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Computation
       Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer
       Friedman and Wand and Haynes, Essentials of Programming Languages [1st edition]
       James F. Gimpel, Algorithms in Snobol4
       Paul Graham, On Lisp
       Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
       Grune and Jacobs, Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide
       Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine
       Kernighan and Pike, The Practice of Programming
       Kernighan and Pike, The Unix Programming Environment
       Kernighan and Plauger, Software Tools in Pascal
       Donald Knuth, Literate Programming
       Glenn Krasner (editor), Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice
       Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work
       Wm Leler, Constraint Programming Languages
       Liskov and Guttag, Abstraction and Specification in Program Development
       Peter Norvig, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming
       Chris Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures
       Richard O'Keefe, The Craft of Prolog
       P. J. Plauger, Programming on Purpose I. (and II and III)
       P. J. Plauger, The Standard C Library
       Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface
       Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
       Toby Segaran, Programming Collective Intelligence
       Toffoli and Margolus, Cellular Automata Machines
       Niklaus Wirth, Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler
       Witten, Moffat, & Bell, Managing Gigabytes
       (mostly from my old list at http://wry.me/~darius/personal/books.html)

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