Resources

This is an unordered, opinionated list of useful things on the Internet. Things I find valuable, things I don’t want to get lost. Things I want to read again.

This list is a little biased towards Haskell programming, which reflects what I was learning at the time …

Learning resources

I’ve found these resources exceptionally effective for learning:

• Learn X in Y minutes is a high-quality, high-density introduction to a variety of technical topics with emphasis on demonstration. web site.
• The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard describes where things should be on Unix systems.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a seminal MIT book on computer science by means of Scheme.

Principles and ideas

Make sure you’re solving the right problem. Perspective is valuable.

• Doug Engelbart’s 1968 Mother Of All Demos is an interactive walk-through of a wealth of technological innovations. Some of which, we still don’t have access to fifty years later!
• Bret Victor’s work towards giving content creators an immediate connection to what they’re creating.
• Dreamsongs by Richard P. Gabriel is the works of a designer. Wrote Patterns of Software, an impressive book on software design.

Haskell programming

Haskell is a purely fuctional programming language.

• Stephen Diehl’s What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell is a high-quality introduction to Haskell. Diehl has other well-written resources on his main
• Designing and Using Combinators: The Essence of Functional Programming is a course by John Hughes, one of the “founders” of Haskell.
• CIS 194: Introduction to Haskell is a course taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where the course material is published to the web.
• Haskell in the Large is a talk on Haskell from a practical systems engineering perspective.

Uncategorized

Feeling lucky? Have a peek.

• Paul Graham has many interesting opinions on startups, lisp and life in general. Paul Graham has written On Lisp, which is available on-line.
• Wait but why presents topics in-depth in the format of a blog.
• Jamie Zawinski was a principal part of the team that made Mozilla.
• Eric S. Raymond has made central contributions to Unix and the Internet, and provides a wealth of on-line resources. Topics include Unix culture and how to build a hacker mentality.
• Peter Norvig is director of research at Google, and has written the textbook on AI.
• Harish Narayanan has made a serious attempt to revolutionize the education of computational mechanics by visualizing with programming instead of relying on analysis of equations.
• Emacs rocks is a series of high-quality Emacs screencasts demonstrating using Emacs to solve a particular problem.
• Thomas Petricek has made a tool for interactive data visualization on the web, and presents good arguments why we should step away from frameworks, and towards functional, scalable libraries.
• WikiWikiWeb discusses a range of topics, mostly related to programming.
• Joel On Software is a blog on software development and management by Joel Spolsky, who created Trello and co-created Stack Overflow. He usually has calibrated, practical opinions.
• Dan Luu writes well about highly technical topics.
• Jorge Israel Peña has written a solid guide on Clojure, and even reads Sanderson! Peña also uses Hakyll for his quite beautiful website.
• Yevgeniy Brikman has compiled a list of fantastic tech talks for programmers and made a good introduction to start-ups for programmers. He has also written a quality guide on how to write good documentation.
• Daniel Higginbotham has written Clojure for the Brave and True and an introduction to visual design.
• Over the Wire is a set of hacking-related challenges. You are given SSH credentials to log in (somewhere). Reading the task there, you try to find the credentials for the next level!
• Algorithms is a free on-line textbook by Jeff Erickson.
• Martin Fowler has written a book on Domain Specific Languages and signed the original Agile Manifesto.
• Howard Abrams has demonstrated literate DevOps with Org-mode, and is heavily Emacs-driven.
• Marc-Antoine Perennou has made a series of blog posts covering Unix basics.