My own curated (meaning subjective) list of awesome things (relating to computer science). I have (tried to) include examples and screenshots of everything. Unlicensed for maximum fork enjoyment. Note that this license only applies to anything I have written — the screenshots might contain material owned by the respective websites and I have copied some of the explanations verbatim (this is, after all, still a work in progress!)
Please send in pull requests if I missed anything obvious!
This is kind of supposed to be a replacement for my browser bookmarks. I thought it would be better to put these links out here for everyone, than to have them rot in my previous convoluted folder hierachies.
- Entertainment that isn't pointless.
- Resources to help you learn.
- Challenges for programmers.
- Design resources that might help you.
- Tools that I find essential.
- Languages
- Further things I don't know how to categorize.
Semi-regular publications. As the publication frequency is much lower than news websites, these can go into much more detail and are thus probably the best way learn about recent advances.
The international journal of Proof of Concept or Get The Fuck Out. For every release, hackers from all around the world gather together to share what they have accomplished in what is without doubt the most natural form: the proof of concept. They don't just share the, occasionally somewhat exaggerated, story: all of the code you need to reproduce it at home is included as well! Many of the hacks in this journal involve retro hardware, and mind-boggling file format hackery. The only thing that is asked of you, the reader, is to print and redistribute this document so that is can reach as many peopler as possible. Instructions on how to print it and how to price it (spoiler: it's free!) is included in every issue.
These are news sites worth reading and hopefully re-reading, about technology and related topics.
Technology-focused community centered around link aggregation and discussion. All links are user-submitted. Small friendly community. Invite-only and ad free.
Social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. Run by startup fund Y Combinator. User-submitten link aggregator, bigger community, less personal but also ad-free.
Independent news and views for the tech community. Based in London, UK. Does some really good dry humor, as you would expect.
News, guides, reviews, and features.
A community for sharing thoughtful information and conversation. Similar to Lobsters, but focussed on science in general.
Generic tech news.
A few technology/culture centric blogs woth checking out.
Law, technology, and the space between.
Regular writings involving Rust, Ruby and how to take things like syscalls apart.
This blog began in 2003 as a personal online journal; in the past few years it became mostly an outlet for technical, programming-related posts. It's my way to document things I find interesting for my future self.
Blog about programming in a variety of languages, including Python, C, C++.
Adventures in learning and designing analog electronics!
Art, engineering, reverse engineering, and cats! The awesome fusion of programming and electronics.
This two-part series, consisting of A Digital Media Primer for Geeks and Digital Show & Tell, you can learn about the interface between analog and digital: how are analog singals captured? How are they reproduced? What kinds of analog signals can we capture? What does the sampling frequency have to do with this? What is the Nyquist frequency? Why does it still make sense to use sampling rates much higher than the audible spectrum to capture analog signals accurately?
Offers a wide variety of video and audio material distributed by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest association of hackers, provided in native formats (usually MPEG and/or Vorbis families) for online viewing. Older, archived recordings might require proprietary players. The media files on this site can also be downloaded for offline consumption. Some of the talks here are in German — but most are available in English for your discretionary consumption.
You want to learn something?
Resources from around the web.
Has two sections, which are of equally high quality: the Primers, which are a terse explanation of mathematical concepts that are used or useful in computer science. Is there a topic in mathematics that you don't quite understand or you want to refresh, but you don't want to read an 800-page mathematics textbook? Then this section is for you.
The other section is the Main Content, which assumes that you are familiar with all the topics mentioned in the Primers.
Has a very nice overview of the field of computer science, along with very helpful literature for most parts of it, and what is expected of a computer scientist to know of each of the parts.
Finding a path to enlightenment in Programming Language Theory can be a tough one, particularly for programming practitioners who didn’t learn it at school. This resource is here to help. Provides a listing of resources to help deepen one's understanding of PLT.
A visual introduction to probability and statistics. Want to refresh your knowledge of probability and statistics, but prefer not to wade through dry textbooks? Then this page is for you.
An introductory course on cryptography, freely available for programmers of all ages and skill levels. Started as a presentation at PyCon 2013, which tried to go through all of the major dramatis personae of cryptography to make TLS work in 45 minutes. This book is the natural extension of that, with an extensive focus on breaking cryptography.
A series of screencasts targeted at people that want to learn or imporove their
command of vim, from the author of Practical Vim, a really good book on vim
(I bought it years ago to improve my vim skills, and still keep it in reach of
my desk).
ISBN: 978-3836554534
Ditch graphic designer and Dutch Fontana Publishers founder explains all you ever wanted to know about printing letters and numbers. In the book, he not only explains the basics of lettering, but also examines in detail over 150 typefaces, their unique characteristics and where they come from.
So you think you can code? Well, prove yourself wrong with any one of these challenges. Choose from math, crypto or coding-themed puzzles.
A series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Provides a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.
Great place for beginners and more advanced people alike, whether you are interested in learning or improving your programming skills or in mathematics.
A different way to learn about crypto than taking a class or reading a book. We give you problems to solve. They're derived from weaknesses in real-world systems and modern cryptographic constructions. We give you enough info to learn about the underlying crypto concepts yourself. When you're finished, you'll not only have learned a good deal about how cryptosystems are built, but you'll also understand how they're attacked.
Great place for some hands-on experience with cryptography, the challenges aren't too difficult but they provide a good understanding of the theory behind some of the crypto we use.
Some problems related to computer security (specifically poorly implemented security). You are free to use any language and environment you like to complete them. The problems require familiarity with programming, but not necessarily with applied cryptography or computer security in general.
This book (CS:APP3e) is the third edition of a book that stems from the introductory computer systems course developed at Carnegie Mellon University, starting in the Fall of 1998, called "Introduction to Computer Systems" (ICS)
Assignments involving low-level programming, some of them are quite interesting.
CodeChef was created as a platform to help programmers make it big in the world of algorithms, computer programming and programming contests. We host three featured contests every month and give away prizes and goodies to the winners as encouragement. Apart from this, the platform is open to the entire programming community to host their own contests. Major institutions and organizations across the globe use our platform to host their contests. On an average, 30+ external contests are hosted on our platform every month.
These can help you learn security concepts by providing safe and legal environments where you can break security. It's like a sandbox for hackers.
The wargames offered by the OverTheWire community can help you to learn and practice security concepts in the form of fun-filled games.
Provides a list of online (hosted) wargames, along with informations on how to access it (SSH access).
Aggregates resources and links to challenges. Probably more extensive than my list, and also includes some rather obscure ones. Worth checking out.
Has some simple C scripts that need to be cracked with standard Linux utilities.
A small (~30-problem) set of challenges for that has an interactive online learning area.
There are also some commecial challenges. These websites might offer paid subscriptions or they might be sponsored by companies and used as recruitment tools. They still have interesting problems — but some people use these as a means to get hired instead of out of the pure pleasure of solving a (complicated) problem.
The HackerRank team is on a mission to match every developer in the world to the right job by providing a technical recruiting platform that assesses developers based on actual coding skills. Our solution is revolutionizing the way companies discover and evaluate talented developers. HackerRank is the destination for the best developers to hone their skills and for companies to find top software developers.
Over 750 questions for you to practice. Come and join one of the largest tech communities with hundreds of thousands of active users and participate in our contests to challenge yourself and earn rewards.
Another programming quiz website.
There are also some challenges that are a little more game-like. Some of these might be good for beginners, while others might be good because you can watch your code running, live.
You take control over a warrior, by writing a minimalist A.I. to control him on his quest. Cute retro pixel art and Ruby make this a pleasant and addicting game at the same time.
Screeps means “scripting creeps.” It’s an open-source sandbox MMO RTS game for programmers, wherein the core mechanic is programming your units’ AI. You control your colony by writing JavaScript which operate 24/7 in the single persistent real-time world filled by other players on par with you.
Think of a crossword puzzle. Now, instead of hints, you replace them with Regexes. And instead of words, the solution can be anything. Well, anything that the regex matches. Intrigued? Check it out!
You need help with some of these challenges? Or you want to learn more? These resources might help.
The purpose of this book is to give the reader a thorough introduction to competitive programming. The book is especially intended for students who want to learn algorithms and possibly participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) or in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
Programming and Design is inseparably linked — whenever you write code, you design. That could be the design of the framework, the design of the API, or the design of the UI. These are some resources that are related to programming and design.
Unsplash, ★★★★★
Over 300,000 free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers. Need a new wallpaper? A backgroup photo for a website design? Stock photos to fill in some blanks?
Project that patches developer targeted fonts with a high number of glyphs (icons). Specifically to add a high number of extra glyphs from popular 'iconic fonts' such as Font Awesome ➶, Devicons ➶, Octicons ➶, and others.
These are particularily well-suited for use as console fonts, being a
lovechild of traditional monospaced programming fonts and iconic fonts
means you can both use them for programming work as well as to disply
fontawesome icons as outputs in scripts or you can use the powerline
glyphs to aesthetically spice up your vim.
Flexible system of fonts designed specifically for code by David Jonathan Ross. It offers both monospaced and proportional fonts, all with a large range of widths, weights, and styles for richer code formatting. A particularly beautiful set of monospace fonts for programming. Free for personal use.
TODO.
In this section I will showcase the most useful tools that I have an use. These include both command-line and GUI tools. I'm a big proponent for doing things the command-line way, but there are some things here and there that GUIs are just better at.
An API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and instantly searches offline documentation sets for 200+ APIs, 100+ cheat sheets and more. You can even generate your own docsets or request docsets to be included.
I really don't know what I would do without Dash. If you need to find out the name of a method of a function in a given programming language, if you need to find out how a given library function works, or for some languages even if you want to look up the source code of a particular function, Dash is there for you. No more googling anything, you just download the docsets for all the languages (and libraries, and Ruby gems, and Npm packages, and whatever else you need) and you alwasy have it with you.
The world's most popular application for interacting with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatrooms on macOS. Includes two elegantly designed dark and light variants of the user interface which have been refined all the way down to the very last pixel. Supports very powerful modern technologies such as native IPv6, the latest IRCv3 specifications, client-side certificate authentication, and much, much more in a easy to navigate, clutter free environment. Protects your privacy by leveraging widely accepted, proven technologies such as Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) to ensure that the only people reading your conversations are those that you intend to.
My favourite (and only) GUI IRC client on macOS. It's really beautiful, it just works, it's not overloaded. Also, it's open source — on the website you won't find it directly, but the source is on GitHub and it is possible to build it from source (if you know what you're doing).
Normally, the git command-line tool is just what you need. It's more
efficient to use while you're in the terminal anyways, you don't want to
have to mess around with any buttons. But, there is just a handful of
things that GitUp is really good at:
GitUp can visualize your repo so you know exactly what's going on, and the great thing is that the visualization is real-time, meaning that it updates while you mess with your repo.
I think this might just be the best feature of GitUp — it saves snapshots of your repo before and after you do things, meaning that when you do something stupid, you can always go back.
Basically any thing you can do with git, you can also do with GitUp.
I think as an open-source tool, GitUp is useful to have in your toolbelt.
It might not replace your everyday use of git, but it will be there when
you need it.
Simple, performant, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator for macOS and Linux.
Probably the fastest terminal emulator out there.
I wrote this whole document in vim running inside tmux running in Alacritty.
Need I say more?
Terminal multiplexer: run multiple virtual terminals in one physical terminal. Want two terminals side-by-side? No problem. Want four terminals in one? Easy. Want a large terminal to edit a file and a smaller underneath to run tests? Done.
Powerful shell with scripting language.
-
Open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration.
-
Zsh configuration framework with blazing speed and modular extensions.
The standard shell on most systems. Very simple but decent. This probably comes pre-installed on your system anyways but hey — sent it some love.
- Sensible Bash: Sane bash defaults.
The ubiquitous editor. Available on most systems out-of-the-box. Versatile. Extendable with plugins. Famously difficult to quit out of. If you can conquer Vim — you'll feel right at home anywhere.
-
Makes it super easy to install plugins and runtime files into their own private directories. Why? Because it means that you can clone Vim plugins into
~/.vim/bundleand they will be autoloaded. -
Sensible defaults for Vim.
-
Syntax checker for Vim.
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File explorar plugin for Vim.
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Solarized colorscheme for Vim.
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Lean and mean status / tabline for Vim that's light as air.
Modern editor based on Vim, with better extendability support.
No plugins, zero configurations. All the essentials packed in by default. Written in Rust, inspired by Vim.
The de-facto standard (distributed) version control system. Tracks your code files, allows you to undo any change that you have committed, allows you to work on one codebase with multiple people, allows for easy backups of all your code, works seamlessly with large projects or even modular projects.
These are projects that interest me, usually from an academic point of view. These projects might be under construction, incomplete or unusable — but that's not really the point.
Obviously, operating systems are interesting to a Computer Scientist. But there are many more beyond the big three — Windows, macOS and Linux. And what lies beyond them is where the magic happens.
Unix-like operating system written in Rust, aiming to being the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel and full set of applications.
Unix-like operating system that was developed at University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, using Donald E. Knuth's concept of Literate Programming, both for the implementation and the documentation. Written in C and Assembler for the Intel x86 architecture. It is available in source form, and as book, which includes the documentation and the source code.
![img/xv6.png]
A Unix-like operating systems in less than 10kLoC. Comes with booklets containing the complete source code as well as with a commentary explaining how things work. Minimalistic, but good to understand the basic concepts of how operating systems work.
Which programming languages do I find cool? Which programming languages do I find useful? Which programming languages would I recommend to a friend to learn?
Ruby: ruby-lang.org
Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life. Building on this, he adds: Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.
By far my favourite language. The syntax is very expressive, the standard library is really good and the package manager, RubyGems is fantastic.
It is very easy to install packages, called gems in Ruby teminology:
$ gem install bcrypt
And in addition to that, Ruby itself is very nice to use.
5.times do
puts ["Hello", "world!"].join(' ')
endA Ruby static code analyzer, based on the community Ruby style guide.
It is easily installed with RubyGems:
$ gem install rubocopWith a valid ruby file, like such:
# bad -- four spaces instead of two.
def bad_method
puts "hello!"
end
# bad -- uses semicolon to separate expressions.
bad_method; bad_method
# bad -- no whitespace between operator.
sum = 1+3
# bad -- don't use several empty lines in a row.
puts(sum)Running rubycop on it produces a set of warnings (--format simple reduces the
verbosity of the output):
$ rubocop --format simple examples/rubocop/example.rb
== examples/rubocop/example.rb ==
C: 3: 1: Layout/IndentationWidth: Use 2 (not 4) spaces for indentation.
C: 3: 10: Style/StringLiterals: Prefer single-quoted strings when you don't need string interpolation or special symbols.
C: 7: 11: Style/Semicolon: Do not use semicolons to terminate expressions.
C: 10: 8: Layout/SpaceAroundOperators: Surrounding space missing for operator +.
C: 14: 1: Layout/EmptyLines: Extra blank line detected.
1 file inspected, 5 offenses detectedSome, but not all issues can be corrected automatically. To tell rubocop to try
to fix things, use the -a option, like so:
$ rubocop --format simple -a examples/rubocop/example.rb
== examples/rubocop/example.rb ==
C: 3: 1: [Corrected] Layout/IndentationWidth: Use 2 (not 4) spaces for indentation.
C: 3: 10: [Corrected] Style/StringLiterals: Prefer single-quoted strings when you don't need string interpolation or special symbols.
C: 7: 11: Style/Semicolon: Do not use semicolons to terminate expressions.
C: 10: 8: [Corrected] Layout/SpaceAroundOperators: Surrounding space missing for operator +.
C: 14: 1: [Corrected] Layout/EmptyLines: Extra blank line detected.
1 file inspected, 5 offenses detected, 4 offenses correctedCrystal: crystal-lang.org
Crystal is a programming language with the following goals:
- Have a syntax similar to Ruby (but compatibility with it is not a goal)
- Statically type-checked but without having to specify the type of variables or method arguments.
- Be able to call C code by writing bindings to it in Crystal.
- Have compile-time evaluation and generation of code, to avoid boilerplate code.
- Compile to efficient native code.
Basically, Crystal is like an improved (in terms of performance) version of Ruby. It is statically typed — but thanks to type inference, you don't have to specify types. There are some other differences, since it is a compiled language it's not possible to evaluate code at runtime, but in exchange the speed is on-par with C.
The shards package manager is very useful because it is decentralized and allows to install dependencies from any git repository.
# A very basic HTTP server
require "http/server"
server = HTTP::Server.new(8080) do |context|
context.response.content_type = "text/plain"
context.response.print "Hello world, got #{context.request.path}!"
end
puts "Listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080"
server.listenC (/siː/, as in the letter c) is a general-purpose, imperative computer
programming language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable
scope and recursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended
operations. By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical
machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications
that had formerly been coded in assembly language, including operating
systems, as well as various application software for computers ranging from
supercomputers to embedded systems. Source:
wikipedia.org
C is a little bit of an oddball: It doesn't really have a website that I could link to. But I guess that's okay, I mean basically everyone knows it.
What is awesome about it, you ask? The fact that it is still alive. It might not be the nicest of all languages. In fact, when categorizing it, it is easiest to list the things that it doesn't have. Without a package manager, building code is usually done with an embarassingly fragile set of scripts that are prone to failure when run on an unfamiliar platform. Without namespacing, most libraries prefix all functions and macros with the name of the library. Without memory safety, we need all kinds of tools, sanitizers, fuzzers and checkers to test if programs leak and behave, and even with these tools bugs and security issues are common. But despite all of that, C is still the most important language. Not because it is pretty, but because it is one of the most basic building blocks, with most languages implemented in C. Knowing C is paramount when trying to understand other languages by digging into their source code.
Fast memory error detector, that can find out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-free, double-free, invalid free, memory leaks.
Run-time memory leak detector.
Detector of uninitialized reads.
Fast undefined behavior detector. Modifies the program at compile-time to catch various kinds of undefined behavior during program execution, for example: using misaligned or null pointers, signed integer overflows, or conversion to, from, or between floating-point types which would overflow the destination.
Tool to format C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Objective-C/Protobuf code.
The debugger we all know, love and hate.
Next generation, high-performance debugger.
A set of tools and APIs to perform static analysis, code visualizations, code navigations, or style-preserving source-to-source transformations such as refactorings on source code. There is good support for C, Java, Javascript and PHP. There is also preliminary support for other languages such as C++, Rust, C#, Html, CSS, Erlang, Lisp, Haskell, Python, OPA and SQL. There is also very good support for OCaml code so that the framework can be used on the code of pfff itself.
Record a failure once, then debug the recording, deterministically, as many times as you want.
An instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. Includes tools that can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile code in detail.
Snow: github.com/mortie/snow
Header-only unit testing library for C.
C really doesn't have a lot built-in. As far as testing goes, the only
tool that C provides is the assert() macro, which can be used to
set run-time assertions, which will abort the program when false.
Snow wraps this into a nice-to-use DSL for defining tests for different modules and pretty-prints the test invocation.
This is what a sample test with snow could look like (adapted from the snow GitHub readme):
describe(files, {
it("opens files", {
FILE *f = fopen("test", "r");
assertneq(f, NULL);
defer(fclose(f));
});
subdesc(fread, {
it("reads 10 bytes", {
FILE *f = fopen("/dev/zero", "r");
assertneq(f, NULL);
defer(fclose(f));
char buf[10];
asserteq(fread(buf, 1, 10, f), 10);
});
});
});
snow_main();Jansson: github.com/akheron/jansson
Parse and generate JSON formatted data.
Debug: github.com/esneider/debug
Debug like a sir.
utf8.h: github.com/sheredom/utf8.h
UTF-8 string handling made easy.
Onigmo: github.com/k-takata/Onigmo
Regex library, default library used by Ruby 2.0 and later.
Rust: rust-lang.org
Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
Featuring: zero-cost abstractions, move semantics, guaranteed memory safety, threads without data races, trait-based generics, pattern matching, type inference, minimal runtime, efficient C bindings,
We all have a joke or two about a hipster programmer wildly fighting the Rust borrow checker. It's a beautiful language, with a very intimidating promise and the potential to rival C. It does have a sweet syntax, taking in many inspirations from other languages.
A tool for formatting Rust code according to style guidelines.
Installer for Rust.
This description is actually a bit underwhelming, since rustup does a little
more than just installing Rust. It can keep track of different toolchains for,
you can use it to switch between channels (eg. stable, beta, nightly),
and you can update each toolchain.
Python: python.org
Scheme: call-cc.org
OCaml: ocaml
Node.js: nodejs
Java9: java9
Haskell: haskell
RISC5: risc5asm
C++: cpp
clang-tidy: clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy
A clang-based C++ “linter” tool. Its purpose is to provide an extensible framework for diagnosing and fixing typical programming errors, like style violations, interface misuse, or bugs that can be deduced via static analysis.
Catch2: github.com/catchorg/Catch2
Simple unit testing framework for C++
Swift: swift
Nim: nim
LuaJIT: luajit
D: dlang.org
Assorted Awesome lists worth checking out with content related to mine.