In my opinion it also lacks "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment", "Hackers and Painters", "The Cathedral & the Bazaar", "Free as in Freedom", "Rice Tea", "Free Culture", "Steal This Book", "Do it!", "Little Brother", "For The Win"... just to quote those which pop into my head as I'm writing this.
I would include "Algorithms in C" by Sedgewick [1] and might tone down the wilder side (I mean it is important to understand the dark side of the force but not to dwell on it (unless you're an secops type)).
Considering the age of this list, would it not be a terrible idea to create a new one using HN suggestions. Or maybe a much better idea, throw together a website where people can add books (using amazon metadata) and then up vote (or down vote) them so we can build a list of the most important books for hackers to read.
I agree. A first step is to search HN for "book review"[1] and see what the review says and how many upvote it has. I know it's not exactly what you ask for but it's a start.
The problem with the upvote/downvote mechanism for things like books is that popular books tend to get voted higher than better, less popular books. If only 5 people have heard of a book, but they all think it's amazing, it should probably be around equal or higher than a book that a hundred people read and all thought was okay.
Come on we have an entire community of math and computer science wizards here, I think heuristics like that can be quite easily written. Especially using a tab for "Popular Books" and another "Highly Rated"
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 48.1 ms ] threadThere must be some newer books that would be worthwhile.
On a more serious note, it seems to me that some of this list is still pretty valid.
But it's a great idea to have such a list!
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Parts-1-5-Bundle-Fundamenta...
Edit: I do still think an up/down vote system to build a Top Hacker News suggested books, could be really cool to see
[1] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinato...