Computer science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about telescopes, or biology about microscopes
– Attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, Alan Perlis, Jacques Arsac, George Johnson, Donald Knuth, Matthew Dennis Haines

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics
– Galileo Galilei

Humans are tool builders.. and computers are like a bicycle for the mind
– Stieve Jobs

CS Computer Science

• Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner
• Mathematics for Computer Science Eric Lehman and Tom Leighton 2004
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes

Algorithms

• Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein
• The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena
• Algorithms in C++ by Sedgewick
• Information Retrieval: Data Structures & Algorithms edited by William B. Frakes and Ricardo Baeza-Yates
• Algorithms by Papadimitriou, Dasgupta
• Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences by Gusfield
• Randomized Algorithms by Motwani, Raghavan

SWA Software Engineering & Architecture

• Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know and evolution over time by Jeff Dean (Google) and Norvig
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
• What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
• Computer Organization аnd Design by Patterson 5th еdition 2014
• Site Reliability Engineering How Google Runs Production Systems
• Structured Parallel Programming Patterns for Efficient Computation by Michael McCool et al.
• Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann 2016
• Planning Extreme Programming by Fowler and Beck
• Refactoring by Kent Beck, and Martin Fowler
• Computer Architecture by Tanenbaum
• Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
• C++ Concurrency in Action by Anthony Williams
• Clean Code by Robert Martin
• POSA Pattern-oriented Software Architecture by by Frank Buschmann et al.
• Unix Network Programming by Richard Stevens
• Compilers Principles, techniques, and tools by Aho 2007
• Computer systems a programmer’s perspective by Bryant, Hallaron
• Readings in Database Systems, 5th Edition by Bailis et al.
• Security Engineering by Ross Anderson 3rd edition 2020

ML Machine Learning

• Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data by Peter Norvig
• Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton
• An Introduction to Statistical Learning. 2016. ISLR Sixth Printing
• Machine Learning A Probabilistic Perspective by Kevin P. Murphy
• David MacKay. Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
• Elements of Causal Inference by Jonas Peters, Dominik Janzing, and Bernhard Scholkopf
• The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie et al.
• Rules of Machine Learning: Best Practices for ML Engineering by Google
• Probabilistic Graphical Models by Daphne Koller, Nir Friedman
• Machine Learning by Tom M. Mitchell

AI

There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn’t yet been programmed. This “Theorem” was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
– 1979, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Chapter 18: Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects. Investigated Quote Origin: As Soon As It Works, No One Calls It AI Anymore

AI began with the ancient wish to forge the gods
– Machines Who Think by Pamela McCorduck

Humanity Is a Kind of ‘Biological Boot Loader’ for AI (hope we’re not just)
– Elon Musk 2019

English is the newest programming language
– Karpathy

• AI, a Modern Approach by Russel, Norvig (3rd Edition)
• Levels of Organization in General Intelligence by Yudkowsky 2002
• Artificial Intelligence and Games by Yannakakis and Togelius

Hard problem of consciousness

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills
― Arthur Schopenhauer quoted by Alan Turing in Computing Machinery and Intelligence

You are not the one who speaks your thoughts — you are the one who hears your thoughts. In Hebrew, the word for the highest soul, that which God breathed into Adam, is N’Shama — “the hearer”
― Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I have familiarized myself with the factual data of a theoretical and practical problem; I do not think about it again, yet often a few days later the answer to the problem will come into my mind from its own accord; the operation which has produced it, however, remains…a mystery to me
– Parerga and Paralipomena by Arthur Schopenhauer

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
– A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking (New York 1988)

The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.
.. There is only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent; in truth there is only one mind.
.. If finally we look back at that idea of [Ernst] Mach [1838-1916], we shall realize that it comes as near to the orthodox dogma of the Upanishads as it could possibly do without stating it expressis verbis . The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing.
– Schrödinger, Erwin. My View of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1964.