Notable omissions in the James-Joyce CS Section
Don't get me wrong- the JJ has most of the works you'll need as a CS undergrad, especially if Java's the only thing you're exposed to (although what that says about the reader I leave as an exercise). However it's not that hard to push the boundaries and find a few glaring seminal works either omitted completely or severely lacking in quantity.
It's not sufficient to have a solitary copy of a significant text and 20 copies of a lesser one when the latter is not only objectively better but more likely to age well, a particularly acute problem in a CS section. "Underwater basket-weaving Synergies with Java" or whatever might get mediocre kids through exams in 2011, and maybe that's all the CSI department cares about, in which case I'm wasting my time convincing them that shelling out for a few more copies of SICP every so often would get a decent return on investment. But on the off-chance that they give a shit about something other than producing fodder for cube-farms I'm compiling a list of what I think is currently found wanting.
An omission qualifies as the absence or shortage of physical copy from the shelf; I don't care if they have a link to an electronic copy on the catalogue search, I'm referring to dead trees:
- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - all pretty old, 1st editions
- Schneier, Applied Cryptography - no copies
- Sipser, introduction to the theory of computation - one copy
- Okasaki, Purely functional data structures - no copies
- Dybvig, The Scheme programming language (4th ed) - one copy of the 3rd edition
- Friedman et al, The Little Schemer - no copies
- Norvig, Paradigms of AI - one copy
If When I find any more I'll update the list.
