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Another unlikely, but ultimately very useful reference:
The Complete Works of Lewis Carrol
I was working at a very tiny, all Indian start-up some ages (over a
decade) ago. My job was to document an object-oriented, multimedia
DBMS where the only interface was a huge-ish C++ API. All well and
good, except that I had never actually looked at a line of C or C++
code before starting there.
At one point, I barged into lead engineer's office, and asked him
what the * and ** in the code meant. He promptly took down The
Complete Works of Lewis Caroll, opened it up to the place in Through
the Looking Glass where Alice and Humpty Dumpty are arguing about the
song he is going to sing, and used the four levels of indirection in
that dialog to teach me about pointers and far pointers.
Of course our lead engineer and CTO was a brilliant man with a gift
for teaching. But it does go to show that you can never know what
kind of book may come in handy as a programming reference.
(I wonder if Shakespear can help me understand Java...)
