Orna recently said it seems that I confuse having books with having knowledge. She may be right; I would say that I regard having books as a precursor to having knowledge, a necessary but insufficient condition.
That’s one of the reasons I love working for IBM’s Haifa Research Lab. We have a big library, and a very comfortable arrangement for borrowing books. Once you borrow a book, it’s yours until you no longer want it. If the library doesn’t have a book you want, they’ll order it for you. I order new a book every month or two, and am slowly but surely building a very nice collection at work.
Yesterday evening I was waiting for a regression test to finish, and stopped by the library. There was a large stack of books on a table, just waiting for the right person to pick them. Turns out that the books belonged to the late Josef Raviv‘s estate, and were donated to the library. I picked up four gems:
Design of the UNIX Operating System (Prentice Hall Software Series), by Maurice J. Bach. A classic OS text.
Cryptography: A Primer, by Alan G. Konheim. The only book I haven’t read or at least heard of in the list.
Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude E. Shannon, Warren Weaver. The original ground breaking paper.
Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, by Marvin Lee Minsky. Minsky doesn’t need any introduction. This book is from 1967, I wonder how relevant it is.
Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal 
superb library. nowadays i am just as confused as you ๐
Comment by ideawerkz — October 4, 2004 @ 9:31 AM |
Lame joke, but I have to make it: Books are pointers to knowledge, when you want to learn, you dereference them. Thats why they are called “reference books”.
BTW. We have a fairly large home library, and we are desperately trying to read books faster than we aquire them.
I’ve read all the non-technical books and few technical books, Omer have read all the technical book and few non-technical.
There is one book in our home that non of us read yet, something about Yonathan Operation.
Comment by shapirac — October 5, 2004 @ 2:15 AM |
Lucky for you guys. Orna and me have tons of books neither one has read. One of my dreams is to one day take a sabbatical, just to read all of the books I’ve always wanted to read.
There’s another amazon shipment (3 actually…) on the way.
Comment by mulix — October 8, 2004 @ 6:09 AM |