Recommendations by Jonathan Blow

• 1 min read

I got to know about Jonathan Blow through a YouTube video suggestion. This was about two or three years ago. I found his content (recorded streams) pretty interesting. He talks about all things software. Most importantly, I love his takes on different topics. They're controversial. They make you uncomfortable. But they're very true (IMHO).

"Jonathan Blow is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games Braid and The Witness. Blow was born in California, United States, and became interested in game programming while at middle school."

— Wikipedia

This is a post where I'm compiling his recommendations. The recommendations include Computer Science topics, math for programmers, and some other books.

Computer Science

  • Understand Operating Systems
    What the OS does, what services it provides, the file system, etc.
  • Data Structures
    Try to understand the data structures. Especially, how they're stored in computer memory.
  • Basics of Sorting Algorithms
  • Floating-point numbers
  • Data races
    What they are and how to solve them
  • Databases
    Understand what a database is and try to implement and create a basic one
  • Implement the malloc function
    malloc is a function that appears in the C library to help allocate memory dynamically. Implementing it yourself will help you understand much about memory in the context of a running program

Technical books