September 20, 2006

Freely downloadable books by Niklaus Wirth.

I haven't been aware of the fact that quite a few books by Niklaus Wirth are available as free downloads by now. Among them are such classics as Programming in Modula-2, Algorithms and Data Structures, Compiler Construction, and Project Oberon, all of them either originally in/about Oberon, or adapted to Oberon.

These books have influenced me a lot. Niklaus Wirth's main strength is a focus on the essentials, which is especially apparent in his concise programming style. I can especially recommend Compiler Construction which basically contains all you need to know about compilers in a very thin book (unless you decide to make this your field of expertise), and Project Oberon which contains the complete source code of a full operating system (including a file system, a garbage collector, a GUI, and so on).

See also the ETH Oberon Home Page for more information about Oberon and related materials.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, I'm a was fan of pascal, one of his first languages, and later Delphi.
But his ideas mostly contradict lisp way.
He prefers to give up power in favor of "easy to learn" language. Which maybe a feasible goal for education, but bad goal for creating engineering tools.

Popa Adrian Marius said...

great books, i like the simplicity of the pascal language is very good for learning data structures, algorithms or writing an compiler

I hope to have the time to read them all :)

sysprv said...

Thanks for the links! Found this from reddit. These are classics!

KaranJude said...

nice link n set of books , i hope i finish them some time in thw future.