I put together most of my retrocomputing bookshelf while learning Intel 8080 and CP/M programming, which reflects in the selection of titles. For more great photos of retrocomputing bookshelfs see:
https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/shelfies-bookshelves-with-a-retrocomputing-angle/190
If I were to offer my critique on Oberon, I think it tried a few things too many things at once.
That and people did not yet know you needed to be open source to gain a foothold.
Rob Pike, "Systems Software Research is Dead" etc.
To this day really, with the Rust transition largely based on that model.
PS was organized such that all the code that did the heavy lifting (e.g. convolutions, filters, etc.) was in assembly. One of the lead PS engineers got deeply into Oberon when it was fairly new. He decided that he could rewrite the non-performance-critical code in Oberon while leaving the other code in assembly.
It wasn’t completed, but the experiment gave the team an approach for coping with Apple’s transition to PowerPC (longer story).
Kernighan & Plauger's _Software Tools_ made an impact on me, back in the day. Of course, I was a Fortran programmer then, so it was Ratfor. Nothing especially deep in it, but it made me realize how *obstructionist* a lot of operating systems were!
Also, the Turbo Pascal stuff reminded me of a joke article some of us wanted to submit to Dr Dobbs Journal: "Which is faster: Turbo Pascal, or a hard disk?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Just to add a little color:
Software Tools in Pascal's translation into Russian (published in 1985).
The literal meaning of the title became
Instrumental Means of Programming in the Pascal Language.
> I like a lot the design insight of Software Tools in Pascal.
So do I.
> But sometimes the code gets pretty terse and the very short variable names don't help.
It (and others) helped me learn to read and understand other people's programs.
Myself, I have always perceived it as a demonstration how to program as distinct from a textbook, but I would enter a discussion of what "pedagogical" means.
@arclight Both books are available online. Actually, nearly all are online as that is how I discovered most of them.
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