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ACM Turing Award Lectures. The First Twenty Years 1966-1985 by unknown Highly Recommended |
| ISBN: 0-201-54885-2 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pages: (ACM Press) 483pages Price: £30? |
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| Categories: technology writing solid code |
| Reviewed by Jon Jagger in C Vu 7-5 (Jul 1995) |
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ACM stands for the Association of Computing
Machinery. Every year the ACM presents the prestigious
Turing Award to 'an individual selected for contributions of a technical
nature to the computing community that are judged to be of lasting and major
importance to the field of computing science.' Each recipient of this award
delivers a lecture at the annual ACM conference. This book
is a collection of twenty years worth of award lectures. There are a few
lectures that are very dry or maths oriented, but most are very readable and
very enlightening. I particularly liked the following...1972: The Humble Programmer. Edsger W. Dijkstra.
1974: Computer Programming as an Art. D Knuth.
1978: The Paradigm of Programming: Robert Floyd.
1980: The Emperors Old Clothes. C.A.R. Hoare.
1983: Reflections on Software Research. D Ritchie.
1983: Reflections on a Trusting Trust. Ken Thompson.
Other well known recipients include 1977 John Backus (Backus-Naur diagrams), 1968 R.W.Hamming (hamming codes), 1971 John McCarthy (LISP), 1969 Marvin Minksy, 1967 Maurice V. Wilkes and 1984 Niklaus Wirth (Pascal).
Not cheap, but definitely highly recommended for the serious engineer. As an
alternative to buying it, you could (for a fee) join your nearest University
library. They may keep the ACM periodicals already, but if
not they will be able to get them on inter-library loan.
To link to this review, please use the URL: http://www.accu.org/bookreviews/public/reviews/a/a000135.htm
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