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Posts tagged with "book"

一本好书

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谈论杜克大学“强奸丑闻”的书

Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,从落后而反动的wsj评论看见的。看来是本很有意思的书,先记下来,有空去买本研究一下。

该书作者之一Robert David Johnson专题Blog

周末翻书

周末,一个人在家,看电视已经戒了,把地上的书整理了一下,边理边翻。其中一本颇有感情,是当年第一次步入大学学堂的教材SICP,书前面已经断线,给我用大量的胶水粘住,翻起来有点困难。前段时间一位网人 Email 采访各大牛人,被问道最想读什么技术性书籍的时候,Peter Norvig 还把 SICP 抬了出来。想来不是没有理由的,脚注4提到:

....In fact, the treatment of numbers is one of the trickiest and most confusing aspects of any programming language.....Since our focus in this book is on large-scale program design rather than on numerical techniques, we are going to ignore these problems....

作为google的技术首脑,Norvig对large-scale program design有兴趣的可能性很大,况且这还是scheme。

说到“one of the trickiest and most confusing aspects of any programming language”,又捞出另外一本书——Hacker's delight,厌恶电视、又不知道可以做什么的时候,可以看看这本书,但是如厕时候最好不要,免得蹲的时间过长。

介绍PageRank和HITS的书

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写PageRank算法的书似乎就找到这么一本:Google's PageRank and Beyond -- The science of search engine rankings,Langville是一位女数学教授,Meyer是一位男数学教授,雌雄二教授宣称为了让学生了解数学(线性代数)并不是那么枯燥,写了这本书。比较详细地讨论了PageRank和Jon Kleinberg(当时在IBM Almaden研究中心,现为康奈尔大学教授)的HITS。

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction to Web Search Engines
Chapter 2: Crawling, Indexing, and Query Processing
Chapter 3: Ranking Webpages by Popularity
Chapter 4: The Mathematics of Google's PageRank
Chapter 5: Parameters in the PageRank Model
Chapter 6: The Sensitivity of PageRank
Chapter 7: The PageRank Problem as a Linear System
Chapter 8: Issues in Large-Scale Implementation of PageRank
Chapter 9: Accelerating the Computation of PageRank
Chapter 10: Updating the PageRank Vector
Chapter 11: The HITS Method for Ranking Webpages
Chapter 12: Other Link Methods for Ranking Webpages
Chapter 13: The Future of Web Information Retrieval
Chapter 14: Resources for Web Information Retrieval
Chapter 15: The Mathematics Guide

这本书最好的地方在于总结了散布于各个杂志的相关研究文章,让读者可以自己自足不需要去查阅文献。第二个优点是有MATLAB的源码可供应试玩。第三个优点:此书不厚。

第15章是个简单的数学方法概览,主要是线性代数、马克夫链、图论等。

书的缺点是排版不太好,特别是章节的"Aside"字体很小,而往往篇幅很大,看着费力。


Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

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Encounter with Mathematics - 《数学概观》

科学出版社于2001年翻译出版了瑞典人Lars Garding的书Encounter with Mathematics(中文名《数学概观》)——距离原书出版的日子——1977年——似乎晚了点,我去年买了一本,此书与另外一本有名的《什么是数学》有些类似,都是对数学概览式地、却也是严肃地介绍,谈及了数论、代数、拓朴、分析等内容,有一些评论和历史背景介绍。网上流传一个学生写的数学家轶事集《heroes in my heart/数学家的故事》,据说有很多人看了后悔自己大学没有学数学,有这个感觉并不奇怪,因为那只是一些挑选出来的趣闻,有的甚至未必真实——至少和我看到版本不同。而如果阅读了《数学概观》和《什么是数学》以后后悔自己没有去念数学系、想要更多地了解书中谈到的内容,这个感觉倒很可能是确实的。至少,你爱上的是数学,而不是数学家的怪事。

牛顿的《原理》1999年出版了Cohen英文翻译本,网上可以免费获得的都是拉丁文原版扫描,不知道看懂者几许,cohen的译本评价不错,关于《原理》本身,amazon.com上有个评论很有趣:

I suffered through college math all the way through differential equations, and I never really "got" it. I just memorized the steps and, when exam time rolled around, hoped I could remember which procedure went with which problem. The light finally came on in grad school, and _Principia_ was the switch. Reading the _Principia_ let me get underneath formal calculus and imbued it with a sense of wonder and soul. To see the theory set out step-by-step, to follow with Newton as he envisioned a new way of painting the world, gave me the ability to internalize the calculus, to say, finally, "Yes, that's intuitively right." I wish I'd read the _Principia_ much earlier in my education. It would have saved me a lot of pain.

不过连同导读部分,此书近1000页,要看上一段时间。