Books


I am occasionally asked for my book recommendations on a variety of topics. Here you can find a few suggestions.

Contents

  1. Vincenzo's books
  2. Coursework
  3. Techical Writing
  4. Disclaimer

Vincenzo's books

A list of books authored (in part) by Vincenzo:

Coursework

Here's the textbook for courses that I have taught in the past or I'm scheduled to teach in the near future.
  1. EECS 233. Main, Savitch. Data Structures and Other Objects Using C++. Addison-Wesley.
  2. EECS 425. Kurose, Ross. Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet. Addison-Wesley.
  3. EECS 428. Krishnamurthy, Rexford. Web Protocols and Practice. Addison-Wesley.

Technical Writing

It comes a time when students need to write a thesis or a paper. Virtually everybody has problems with techical writing. Here's an email that I sent to one student, with my expectations and a few suggestions. I'll also mention a couple of books that look good judging from the Amazon's rankings.

Dear Mr. Student,

I read the first few pages of your thesis, which is attached with my comments.

In general, I found a number of basic stylistic and grammatical problems, and the type of comments I made where mostly aimed to correct those. It is your job to prevent these types of basic stylistic and grammar comments. You are supposed to send me a document that in your hearth you believe is the best possible. If in the document there are a lot of grammatical errors that even Words can catch, then obviously this is not your best attempt to a thesis -this is just the first thing that you wrote down.

I strongly suggest the following:
  1. Use Words spelling and grammar checkers to fix all the errors. Sometimes, Words grammar is wrong, but you should give serious attention to any squiggly green (or red) line. Also, you can enable the grammar check by setting appropriate options. (Note: this student used Microsoft Words to compose his thesis. What I really suggest is that you should use LaTeX.)
  2. You should try to imitate the technical style of published papers or thesis.
  3. You should carefully read books that explain how to write. For example, Strunk and White is a classic in general composition. Other books are more specialized to writing a thesis or a technical paper. If you go to the library and ask at the reference desk, the librarian will be more than happy and able to help you with that.
I suggest that you rewrite your thesis, and not just once. I expect you to go through several revisions. Please, send me a writeup only when you believe it is the best that anybody can write. In particular, there should not be any spelling error, only few grammar errors that you have deliberately reviewed, it feels like you are reading a paper, and the paper follows all the instructions in Strunk and White and a couple of other books on style.

I know this is a lot of work. However, even I go through all of this. I've read my manuals of style, I've written papers for 10+ years, and still, at every new paper, I go through 30 to 40 iterations from the first draft to a published journal paper. In your case, you have to put even more effort because it is the first time you are doing it - but precisely because you are a beginner, you cannot think to put less effort than I do on my own papers even after all of these years. The good news is that all of this work will pay off later on as you progress toward you PhD, and write many more papers, and a longer thesis.

Best of luck, and good work!

Vincenzo Liberatore
Schroeder Assistant Professor
Division of Computer Science
Case Western Reserve University

Here's a couple more titles:
  1. Scientific English: A Guide for Scientists and Other Professionals 
  2. The Craft of Scientific Writing
  3. The MIT Guide to Science and Engineering Communication
  4. The Science of Scientific Writing by Gopen and Swan, was a required reading in Micheal Loui's class. I took that class many years ago, but this paper is as wonderful now as it was those days.
  5. Author advice from SIGOPS


Disclaimer

You can follow the links to purchase books from Amazon. A percentage will be returned to the network lab and will be used to acquire technical books that are made available to students, faculty, and staff.
So, far, I have bought Network Security with OpenSSL, and there are still $5.60 in the coffers. Let me know if you have any ideas.



Vincenzo Liberatore / vincenzo.liberatore@cwru.edu