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Are you looking to learn more about everything? This is a great place to start! Meet the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. |
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Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century), O'Reilly has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web.
O'Reilly continues to pioneer new content developments on the Web via its O'Reilly Network affiliate, which also manages sites such as Perl.com and XML.com. O'Reilly's conference arm hosts the popular Perl Conference, the Open Source Software Convention and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
Tim has been an activist for Internet standards and for Open Source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft's 1996 limits on TCP/IP in NT Workstation, organizing the " summit" of key free software leaders where the term "Open Source" was first widely agreed upon, and, most recently, organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. Tim received Infoworld's Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community.
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Tim's favorite books: |
 Programming Perl
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant
ISBN 0596000278
O'Reilly Media
July 2000
"...The first edition of this book hit the shelves in 1990, and was quickly adopted as the undisputed bible of the language. Since then, Perl has grown with the times, and so has this book...".
And to some extent Learning Perl, upon whose backs the interactive web was built.
Just as Whole Internet Guide was the Bible for users of the Internet, Programming Perl became the Bible for the producers of the Internet. From the system administrators slinging around log files and programs to the people making complex dynamic web sites, they all turned to Larry Wall's book.
The C Programming Language
by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
ISBN 0131103628
Prentice Hall
March 1988
For the pure embodiment of concision and precision. The key applications and services of the Internet such as Linux, Apache and mail servers are all built in the programming language C. The definitive book for C is The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie, creators of C and Unix. An entire generation learned to program modern languages from this book, and it's a model of elegance and concision for all who would write books.
 The Mythical Man-Month: Anniversary Edition
by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
ISBN 0201835959
Addison-Wesley
August 1995
For showing us that the reality of programming is a lot messier than the theory. The C Programming Language has remained a classic because C has remained a relevant language. The other relevant book from the 1970s is The Mythical Man Month. Fred Brooks survived a messy IBM operating system rewrite and learned lessons on development and software projects the hard way. Everything he wrote about is still applicable today, and anyone who programs professionally and hasn't read this book is like a snowboarder who hasn't learned what "green," "blue" or "black diamond" implies.
 Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies
by Andy Oram, editor
ISBN 059600110X
O'Reilly Media
March 2001
And finally, let's look to the future. Peer to Peer is a collection of essays on developing decentralized computer systems where we move away from the old idea of "one computer is the server with all the information and power, while the other computers are mere clients that must request information or services from the server." Napster woke everyone up to the possibilities, and the ideas and principles first espoused in Peer-to-Peer live on in modern web services, file sharing and grid computing applications.
The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set
by Donald Knuth
ISBN 0201485419
Addison-Wesley
October 1998
Knuth's trilogy (The Fellowship of the Algorithms, The Two Algorithms and The Return of the Algorithms). "Approachable" probably isn't the word that most would use to describe Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. It's a meticulous exploration of the algorithms that underlie the basic components of programs: sorting, searching, math, parsing and so on. While the existing trilogy isn't named The Fellowship of the Algorithms, The Two Algorithms and The Return of the Algorithms, it is treated with the same reverence as Tolkien's masterpiece.
 DOS for Dummies
by Dan Gookin
ISBN 0764503618
Wiley
May 1998
Because it led to the huge boom in consumer tech books that keeps us alive today :-) Now let's enter the modern age with a surprising title: DOS for Dummies. Perhaps not as relevant as it was (although projects like FreeDOS, www.freedos.org, help ensure DOS is still usable today), DOS for Dummies launched the "consumer technical book" revolution that led to classic bestsellers like Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (ISBN 0596004508) and Adobe Photoshop CS: One-on-One (ISBN 0596006187). These are all books aimed at everyday people, not at the programmers and hackers who previously haunted the computer section of bookstores.
The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog
by Ed Krol
ISBN 1565920635
O'Reilly Media
May 1994
(Out of Print)
Just as DOS for Dummies made the PC accessible to mortals in 1991, O'Reilly's Whole Internet Guide did the same for the Internet in 1992. It covered everything from getting connected to telnet, ftp and MIME e-mail. Of course, the highlight was using the Web through Mosaic. It's worth looking through the table of contents (using Firefox 1.0, the descendant of Mosaic) to realize how far we've come and yet how much still remains the same.
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
by Niklaus Wirth
ISBN 0130224189
Prentice Hall
February 1976
(Out of Print)
Niklaus Wirth laid programming bare with Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. This book became a classic as it came at the time when newcomers to computers would begin by learning programming, rather than moving to programming after they learned the inner workings of the machine. It's approachable, useful and as relevant today as it was then.
Lions' Commentary on Unix
by John Lions
ISBN 1573980137
Peer-To-Peer Communications
August 1977
Not the reprint, but the original samizdat.
Before there was open source, there was Unix. If you wanted to learn how Unix works, you read the source code. The source to Unix 6th Edition wasn't easy to understand, so an Australian computer scientist, John Lions, annotated the source code and opened up its mysteries for everyone. You can buy Lions' book in a re-released form, and you can still learn a lot from it.
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