TOM CORMEN

COMPUTER SCIENCE FAVORITE BOOKS TO TEACH Introduction to Algorithms, by Tom H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams MUST-READ BOOK IN YOUR FIELD Introduction to Algorithms, by Tom Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald Rivest and Clifford Stein FAVORITE PLEASURE READ The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, by Bill James MOST RECENTLY READ Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities, by Richard DeMillo "Introduction to Algorithms was written by four devilishly handsome fellows. It's the second-most cited thing-article, book or anything else-in all of computer science." "If I'm restricted to books that I did not coauthor, then I would choose Style:The Basics of Clarity andGrace. I became aware of this book back in 2004, when I became director of the writing program, and I have used it twice in the computer science (CS) graduate course I teach on how to write CS papers. The Williams book shows you how to take sentences that are syntactically, even semantically, correct, yet have something off about them—you'd like to write 'awk' in the margins—and diagnose what's wrong with them, leading to much-improved revisions." "James combines quantitative analysis, broadbrush baseball history, minutiae and idiosyncratic opinion to give the reader a flavor of the history of the game and insights into what its greatest players really did to help their teams win."