I'm curious why people are upvoting this listicle. Take this example from it:

> Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence by Peter Norvig. Learning the AI described in this book probably won’t land you a job today. But reading the code examples will transform how you think about source code. The book shines when it comes to code comments, a topic that I’ve never seen demonstrated well in other sources. Here we get to see how comments become valuable as a narrative that explains both intent and reasoning. Brilliant, just brilliant.

First, that's not the title of the book. It's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. Second, why would you recommend a book because of comments in code. I checked the code, it has good docstrings, it does not have that many comments beyond that. The commentary (rather than code comments) is the book itself.

And I like this book, but the reason to recommend it is not the code comments (which barely exist outside of his very consistent use of docstrings). The reason to recommend it now (versus back in the day when GOFAI was just AI and the book had more obvious utility) is that you get to see how an expert programmer thinks, Norvig is among the best expositors of programming and CS topics, and seeing how he crafts programs to solve interesting problems is insightful. What's also nice is that he often doesn't start with a worked solution, but also shows some false starts and how he would progress from conception of an idea to trying some things out to a good solution. You actually get a glimpse into how he thinks through things.

So yeah, good suggestion and it impacted me (had it for a course in grad school decades ago), but this "review" is awful and is entirely unconvincing as a recommendation.

The rest of the reviews are only slightly better.

Good recommendations.