What books to read?

I want to study computer science at university and so I have recently started the application process. I am about to start writing my personal statement but have hit a few walls, I don't have anything useful to write about.

What are some good books that will give a useful insight on computer science and help me write a good personal statement? I am not necessarily looking for books that will help me learn a specific language but books about computer science in general.

I want to study computer science at university and so I have recently started the application process. I am about to start writing my personal statement but have hit a few walls, I don't have anything useful to write about.

What are some good books that will give a useful insight on computer science and help me write a good personal statement? I am not necessarily looking for books that will help me learn a specific language but books about computer science in general.

Check out The New Turing Omnibus and The Algorithm Design Manual.

Hi HassanD, first of all - good for you! I'm actually looking to apply for CS teacher training later this year. Are you studying it at A-level currently? How have you found the course?



The main reason I took the liberty of replying to your post was because, given my intentions to teach this subject, I've bought up a lot of books recently in a bid to get my head around what the GCSE courses cover. I'd be inclined to work backwards. If you have a couple of institutions in mind, check out their websites and find out what their CS courses cover. There are lots of books on CS (believe me, there's a stack in my study!), but you could end up chasing your tail trying to find ones that are really relevant. It might be better to find out what the uni course entails, and then read up on those subject areas.

Failing that, Computer Science Illuminated (Nell Dale and John Lewis) is very good; concise but thorough. It's quite weighty and quite pricey, so check eBay and Amazon Marketplace. Don't necessarily pay over the odds for the most recent edition (5th) as you'll probably find you can save a fair few quid going for the 4th or even 3rd.

When I come to apply for the PGCE, I'm going to think about the things I've done in my job (I'm the ICT Manager in a school) and relate them to the course I'm applying for. If there are particular areas of CS that interest you, I'd definitely mention them. It's been a long (long, long, long!) time since I applied to UCAS for my undergraduate degree, but the one thing I remember very clearly was demonstrating my enthusiasm for what I wanted to do. If, for example, the course you're applying for includes coding, find out which languages they use and detail any experience you have of them (or of any equivalents). I'd guess that at degree level you'd be looking at C++ or C#, Java Script, Swift, etc. But that is just a guess.

Thanks for the suggestion, but isn't it a bit too old? I mean if it contains articles about computer science that are from 2003 and older, would it still be useful today?

There is not a single book published after 1985 on my reading list for second year CS. It may disguise itself as a new discipline, but the fundamentals are always going to remain the same and incredibly important.