Keith Douglas' Web Page

About me Find out who I am and what I do.
My resumé A copy of my resumé and other documentation about my education and work experience for employers and the curious.
Reviews, theses, articles, presentations A collection of papers from my work, categorized and annotated.
Current research projects What I am currently working on, including some non-research material.
Interesting people People professionally "connected" to me in some way.
Interesting organizations Organizations I am "connected" to. (Some rather loosely.)
Intellectual/professional influences Influences on my work, including an organization chart. Here you can also buy many good books on philosophy and other subjects via amazon.com. I have included brief reviews of hundreds of books.
Professional resources Research sources, amazon.com associates programs, etc.
What is the philosophy of computing? A brief introduction to my primary professional interest.
My intellectual heroes A partial list of important people. Limited to the dead.
My educational philosophy As a sometime teacher I've developed one. Includes book resources.

Book Influences - Engineering

Title
Author
Purchase / Enjoy Cover
Comment
Boolean Algebra With Computer Applications Williams Dated, and very simplistic (though with an introduction to Karnaugh maps, which helps). Predates IEEE floating point or the death of BCD, and makes the odd prediction that a trinary logic computer revolution was immiment. Nevertheless, a short introduction/refresher on computer arithmetic primarily for beginning engineering/engineering technician students.
Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface Patterson and Hennessy I was surprised at how well this complements Computer Systems: A Programmers Perspective, despite the two different (IA32 in CSAPP's case; MIPS in this book's case) architectures chosen.
Digital Electronics: Logic and Systems Kershaw This book was cheap and on a subject I needed a reference for.
Feynman Lectures on Computation Feymann A little gem of a book on many topics on computing from a unique point of view. Even includes some discussions of the thermodynamics of computation.
Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (2e) Anderson A general study of engineering secure systems, albeit focused on those with a computational component. Since many engineered systems (from cars to medical scanners) these days have computational components, this is a sensible and welcome approach. Although the book has hundreds of references and 900 or so pages of main text, it still feels very introductory in parts - justifiably, since this is a begining book of sorts. Despite this, each chapter is capped with a selection of research problems and many, many further reading suggestions on everything from software design to how the law interacts with security decisions. A monumental reference work and textbook.
Turing's Connectionism: An Investigation of Neural Network Architectures Teuscher A slim book centered around the implementation of some of Turing's (until recently) forgotten ideas in designing "brain like" hardware. I've classified it as an engineering text as the electrical properties of the networks are important to the implementation (signal propagation delay most notably). While there are a few typos and it does read like a master's thesis (as it came out of one - albeit a good one from what can be discerned) and hence is repetitive and contains much review, the cold water that this text throws on hypercomputing a la Siegelmann is worth having. It is also good to have a clear enough analysis of what Turing did and did not propose and a clean up of Turing's own errors.
Verilog Hardware Description Language (2e) Thomas A detailed reference for the Verilog digital synthesis and simulation language.
Verilog Styles for Synthesis of Digital Systems Smith Not a language reference per se - instead a textbook and scholarly discussion of how to use Verilog.

 

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