My Favorite Technical Reading

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King, Pocket Books, 2000 (ISBN 0-7434-5596-7).

  "John Gould [ newspaper editor ] taught me more than any of them in no more than 10 minutes ...

  "When you write, you're telling yourself the story," he said.
  "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."
  
  For more specific advice: The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr. (revisions by E. B. White).
• Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun , Wess Roberts, Warner Books (ISBN 0-446-39106-9).

  "Outlines leadership tenets in a compact, whimsical fashion ... remarkable ... its style makes it light reading and anything but boring." Military Review

• How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method , G. Polya, Princeton University Press (ISBN 0-691-02356-5).

  "... if you solve it by your own means, you may experience the tension and enjoy the triumph of discovery."

• The Practice of Programming, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, Addison-Wesley, 1999 (ISBN 0-201-615865-X).
  
  "Have you ever ...
  • wasted a lot of time coding the wrong algorithm?
  • spent a day looking for a bug you should have found in five minutes? ... "
• How to Read and Do Proofs , Daniel Solow, John Wiley & Sons (ISBN 0-471-86645-8).

  "To play chess, you must first learn how the individual pieces move. ... So it appears to be with mathematics."

• How to Have A Bad Academic Career by David Patterson.

  "Concentrate on getting good grades ..."

• You and Your Research by Richard Hamming (Transcription by J. F. Kaiser).

  "Now for the matter of drive ... What Bode was saying was: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former ...."

• An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions, or, How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper by Roy Levin and David D. Redell
• In the Company of Scholars: The Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education, Julius Getman, Austin: University of Texas Press (ISBN 0-292-72755-0).

  "I began this book to articulate my sense of disappointment and alienation from the status I had fought so hard to achieve."