OpenBSD Journal

Dijkstra's manuscripts worth a read

Contributed by jose on from the late-night-reading dept.

Oliver Neubauer writes: "Since being alerted to their online presence a few weeks back at Slashdot, I have been rummaging through the manuscripts of Prof. Edsger Dijkstra at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ . Dijkstra's name was first introduced to me while studying CS (Dijkstra's algorithm). This online archive is something that any serious computer programmer/admin should have a look at. Dijkstra's philosophy stressed the imperative of mathematical correctness, elegance and simplicity in program/system design and implementation. Many of his ideas can be seen as seminal to the OpenBSD school of thought and thus should be of some interest to deadly.org's readership. I'll forgo a review and simply recommend the articles "On the cruelty of really teaching computer science" (EWD1036) and "My recollections of operating system design" (EWD1303) as a good starting point for anyone; after that, you're on your own."

There's a lot of the "classic" literature that you should be reading if you're a serious CS student or devotee. Sites like Citeseer and the arXiv archive are excellent places to snag CS and other technical papers. Conferences like Usenix (Tech and Security) and LISA, along with a lot of the ACM conferences, have great proceedings. I agree with Oliver and reccomend you check this stuff out. You'll learn a lot and be able to participate in the scene more quickly. A paper a day is a substantial rate, by the way.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    but ... ... .... ...Zzzzzzz ......

  2. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Actually arXiv is just a front for xxx.lanl.gov .

    Comments
    1. By MotleyFool () motleyfool@dieselrepower.org on mailto:motleyfool@dieselrepower.org

      Actually during Dec 2001 it was transferred to;
      http://xxx.arXiv.cornell.edu/

  3. By Marwan Burelle () burelle@lri.fr on http://www.lri.fr/~burelle

    The collection of CS biblio is also a good starting point to search great CS research paper, it can be find at :

    http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/

  4. By Dunceor () on

    yeah Dijkstra's stuff is real intressting and everybody should read it.
    We have had several of his stuff on several of my courses and I have read up on him on my own also.
    EVERYBODY should read it.

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