It's about a man trying to find satori. While I don't agree with Buddhism, it can be a very thought provoking novel, as long as you remove the religious connotations. It's really helped me become a better programmer by removing the things in life that get in the way of my work.
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Anonymous2009-12-06 14:11
Regardless of what you think is useful computer knowledge, this book does a bad job of presenting its topics. Especially for beginners, this book is very frustrating. The first few chapters often employ obscure mathematical tricks as examples of how the computing concepts can be applied. In the end, the reader doesn't see the forest for the trees and tries to figure out the math just to understand what the code samples are doing. Other parts of the book either mention in passing, or devote very little space to interesting ideas, and instead devote pages and pages to something fundamental, to the point that it gets very boring. Finally, I personally think this book is poorly organized. The first four chapters try to focus on maximum abstraction, and the last chapter presents a totally oposing view of computers--as register machines...which is a completely different paradigm. This confuses many people.