Eight Books, Textbook Edition

Eight more books that made a lasting impression

As a follow up to an earlier post, here is a list of eight more books that have had a lasting influence on me. They are text or reference works that were—and in a few cases still are—very helpful resources.
The Calculus by Louis Leithod (5th edition) was my high school Calculus textbook. It was a difficult class taught by a teacher everyone seemed to dislike except for me. I got mediocre grades in his class but I learned a lot from him.
The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, is a book I referred to a lot during my college days and in the very early days of my career.
UNIX in a Nutshell was one of the very first in the O’Reilly “In a Nutshell” series. Before everything was easily accessed online, this was one of those books you kept close at hand and referred to on a daily basis.
Internetworking with TCP/IP by Douglas Comer, taught me a ton about networking at a time when the Internet was still unknown to most people.
Introduction to Data Mining by Tan, Steinbach, and Kumar. Best introduction to machine learning I’ve ever read. (That’s saying a lot because there are a ton of such books out there.) It has possibly the highest concentration of useful information per square inch of any textbook I’ve ever used.
The Riverside Shakespeare was the book I used in my undergraduate Shakespeare course. It, and my excellent instructor, taught me that having good quality annotations makes Shakespeare not only very approachable but also very enjoyable.
When I registered for my first (and only) Art History course as an undergrad, I did it because it seemed the least distasteful of a range of distasteful options to satisfy my fine arts requirement. How wrong I was! The topic of that particular course was ancient art, so of course we barely scratched the surface of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. But it is a book I still come back to occasionally. One of these days I’d like to read it cover to cover.
I did not study photography formally; everything I know came from reading books or trial and error—mostly error. Basic Photographic Materials and Processes by Stroebel et al. is a great introductory text on photometry, optics, exposure, and a host of other topics related to film and processing that I’ve never gotten around to dealing with.