On Timeless Programming Books

Recently, the Dog Spanner wrote about Programming With Quartz, a book written at the tail end of 2005 but which is still useful to Mac developers everywhere. I have to agree, this book is still on my shelf and gets an airing every now and then when I need to do battle with custom drawing (even on iOS).

Today, I had a related moment of epiphany related to the immortal nature of a book, as I had a problem with memory allocation that saw me reaching to Mac OS X Internals: a Systems Approach by Amit Singh. This book was released just before Apple’s transition to Intel hardware, but is still for me a definitive reference on how Mac OS X works. If I need to know about the innards of HFS+, the memory allocator or anything at a similar level, it is to this book I turn.

There’s never really been anything that investigates the higher level components of Mac OS X in quite the same depth. When I need to refresh my knowledge of the UNIX APIs, I turn first to Advanced UNIX Programming, a book first published in 1985(!); but it is the 2004 edition that is still a canonical description of programming in the UNIX environment.

Notice that each of these books is around five years old, and yet still I find myself referring to them frequently. In the fast-changing world of software development, where books on the iPhone 3 SDK are woefully outdated, that’s a great achievement.

Honourable mention: a book I have on my shelf that deserves discussion here is Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach by Brad Cox. Written in 1986, this lays out his vision for component-based software development using object oriented programming languages. In it he describes a little language he created called Objective-C and uses it to explain his vision. This book demonstrates that not all computing principles are long-lived. Today’s programming practices look nothing like the “Software ICs” of OOP, although we’re still stuck using Objective-C.