<story><title>The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow</title><url>http://www.dev-books.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curuinor</author><text>I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file.&lt;p&gt;Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn&amp;#x27;t like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I&amp;#x27;ve heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.</text></item><item><author>JelteF</author><text>Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I&amp;#x27;ve had the pleasure of reading is &amp;quot;Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid&amp;quot; (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.&lt;p&gt;The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about it: &amp;quot;Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mathetic</author><text>He likes computers, he even likes AI. He doesn&amp;#x27;t buy into Ray Kurzweil&amp;#x27;s ideas about singularity [0,1]. He also (as I understand) is in Chomsky school of statistical learning as opposed to Peter Norvig (or Google) school [1,2]. Those two are highly unpopular stances to have these days, so I can see how that can be confused with not liking computers&amp;#x2F;AI.&lt;p&gt;If you read GEB, you can see in different chapters that he is a big fan of computers, simulations, attempts at AI, and the such.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Nhj6fDDnckE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Nhj6fDDnckE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.americanscientist.org&amp;#x2F;bookshelf&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;douglas-r-hofstadter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.americanscientist.org&amp;#x2F;bookshelf&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;douglas-r-hof...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;norvig.com&amp;#x2F;chomsky.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;norvig.com&amp;#x2F;chomsky.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow</title><url>http://www.dev-books.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curuinor</author><text>I heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file.&lt;p&gt;Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn&amp;#x27;t like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I&amp;#x27;ve heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.</text></item><item><author>JelteF</author><text>Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I&amp;#x27;ve had the pleasure of reading is &amp;quot;Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid&amp;quot; (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.&lt;p&gt;The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about it: &amp;quot;Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kiro</author><text>&amp;gt; if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file&lt;p&gt;Why?</text></comment>