Favourite Books (1)

I love books; I enjoy reading them, and I recently learend (here) that reading books is even the best way I can learn (that might be different for you, though).

So, here’s the beginning of a loosely coupled series of blog posts regarding my book shelfs: I want to introduce you to some of my favourites, hopefully with a short sentence of what I like about those volumes.

This is the first part of my reference books that I keep in my ZHAW office - my precious AI/algorithm textbooks. Let’s see what we have here (incomplete - only the favourites):

Minsky’s “The Society of Mind”: A collection of visionary one-page essays on artificial intelligence that a deem to be very inspiring (though haven’t read much of it, I must confess).
Russell/Norvig’s “Artificial Intelligence”: The famous “Agent book”, the textbook on AI; I am going to base a course on this.
Smith’s “Digital Signal Processing”: Thank god someone wrote a book on the fascinating topic of DSP that is comprehensible not only for electrical engineers; I found it very accessible & practical!
Bishop’s “Pattern Recognition & Machine Learning”: Very mathematical (at least from my point of view), but without flaws and errors (this is seldom!) - if you have the time, you can really work through all of the formulae even as a non-mathematician.
Mitchel’s “Machine Learning”: The first textbook on the topic; I very much appreciate the systematics in it (although it doesn’t cover all the now famous algorithms like SVMs).
Witten & Frank’s “Data Mining”: Very accessible introduction to data mining and machine learning, very practical.
Press et al.’s “Numerical Recipes in C”: It saved my a*** when I had to handcode several linear algebra algorithms; although there are more standard libraries now (so it will seldom be needed to handcode) this is the reference on implementing numerical stuff.
Skiena’s “Algorithm Design Manual”: Best (and fun to read!) introduction to algorithms and data structures.
Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes I-III”: What can I say - among the top-100 most influencing science books of the last century, masterpiece, foundation of computer science, a modern classic etc.; you should always cite it at least once. Both the humor and rigor in it is remarkable.

Written on July 11, 2014 (last modified: July 11, 2014)