In Praise of Bibliographies

One of the best things about books are their bibliographies.  Sometimes a book's bibliography is worth more than the book itself.  If it is any good, the bibliography arms you with a map, or a mini-library, to other treasures about the subject you are reading about.   

When you are reading the very first book you have read about a subject, the bibliography is often a map to a new world. If it's a good bibliography, it leads you to treasure. But sometimes it can lead you to a rubbish pile. 

I always skim through the bibliographies of each book I read, marking down titles that may interest me next. 

It’s still vivid in my mind the occasion when I first came across Patrick Henry Winston’s “Lisp”. I remember exactly where I was.  I found a copy at our school library. I was in university, somewhat new to programming, but already infected by an intense interest in computer science, a subject I only had recently discovered. 

I had already read perhaps a dozen Pascal and Fortran books before picking up “Lisp”, but Winston’s was the most wonderfully strange computer programming book I had come across then (and still since). 

First was the very strange programming language (Lisp was not like normal procedural languages).  Then the domain was very new to me (it was the first book I read about Artificial Intelligence).  But it was also because Winston had a quirky writing style.  Looking back later, and understanding his academic interest in how humans learn, I’m sure this style was deliberately designed.

His book imprinted in my mind the names of dozens of computer scientists in the AI field. Names like Marvin Minsky, Douglas Lenat, Elaine Rich, and others whose very unusual sounding names (to me back then) felt like they were not normal humans, but members of a different breed, a strange breed, an alien breed. I swore to read all of them.   

Not all bibliographies are good (and by bibliography I include ‘References’). But, off the top of my head, authors who are great at compiling bibliographies include Andrew S. Tanenbaum, C. J. Date, Jeffrey D. Ullman, Douglas Comer.

Sometimes I forget how I learned about a book. I estimate that of all the books I’ve read or intend to read, the vast majority were inspired from a bibliography of some book I read.

So I thought it might be a fun exercise to list down some key books that have influenced me, write down their bibliographies (I’ll limit it to books only), and see how they are connected.

This is a tedious exercise so it will happen slowly, and when time permits.