Alan Kay's Book Recommendations

"For many years it has been the best single volume narrative of 'life from scratch'."

"An early look and experience with timeless truths (and gotchas) from systems building with teams."

"A few more books like this, and by the time I got to first grade I had been ruined for the 'single book - single truth' ideas of school and church."

"I have never forgotten the combined shock and thrill of making my way through this in my 20s."

"It is actually a 'math book' — with lots of ideas, theorems, proofs, etc., — but presented in the friendliest way imaginable by a great mind."

"This has the same thought expanding properties of Lisp."

"A real gem for helping to think about design and implementations."

"A much stronger way to think about computing — and what 'Computer Science' might mean."

"One of the books that Bob Barton had us read in his famous advanced systems design class in 1967."

"A very different kind of book."

"I have called this the 'Maxwell’s Equations' of computing, because it presents a very large part of what’s important about programming languages."

"A lovely book to read."

"A formative book in so many ways."

"A formative book in so many ways."

"[My wife] completely nailed the Arthur Conan Doyle voice of the characters and narrative, while being able to carry a marvelous story into the much larger realm of the novel."