Books Known By Their Authors

Some books are known informally by their author(s):

• KernighanAndRitchie -- The C Programming Language. Until AnsiCee was standardized; TheBible when it came to the CeeLanguage.
• OppenheimAndSchafer? -- DiscreteTimeSignalProcessing. The classic introductory text for DigitalSignalProcessing.
• Knuth -- TheArtOfComputerProgramming. One of the definitive works in ComputerScience.
  • More often called TAOCP, though. That probably varies by location. As a CS student at CalBerkeley, I heard "Knuth" more often than "TAOCP".
• GangOfFour -- Design Patterns (DesignPatternsBook) by ErichGamma, RichardHelm, RalphJohnson, and JohnVlissides
• AbelsonAndSussman? -- StructureAndInterpretationOfComputerPrograms aka TheWizardBook.
• CLR -- Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest.
  • Unfortunately, that also stands for CommonLanguageRuntime, and probably a few other things as well...
    • Indeed. I can't help being amused when I see late-night TV commercials for this cleaning product:

• StrunkAndWhite -- TheElementsOfStyle
• Fowler's - FowlersModernEnglishUsage?
• Brewer's - BrewersDictionaryOfPhraseAndFable?
• Almost all biochemistry textbooks, and probably most textbooks generally, but only in the context of undergraduate teaching
  • This happens because nearly every biochem text is named Biochemistry, Advanced Biochemistry, An Introduction to Biochemistry, or something very similar. The same happens in other fields.
• Unfortunately for two of its authors, the book Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison is often referred to as "Durbin and Eddy".
• On a similar note: although somewhat out of date now, the standard textbook on 3D graphics is still 'Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice', by James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner, and John F. Hughes, which is universally known as 'Foley & Van Dam'.
  • That's because they were the only two full authors for the 1st edition. The others were added in the 2nd edition, but the popular name didn't change.
• An even worse case is Brock - 'Biology of Microorganisms' is a textbook originally written by Brock. It is now in its ninth edition; Brock has long since retired/died/etc, and it is now written by Madigan, Martinko and Parker - so the book is known by the name of someone who isn't even an author!
  • And in the same vein, possibly the most blatant example, Hoyle, as in the phrase "according to Hoyle". Edmund Hoyle b1672, an expert on popular table games of the day, originally penned his A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist in 1742 and is today, though dead lo some 200+ years, seemingly also an authority on online Texas Holdem Poker.
• Kreyszig
• Halliday & Resnick

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CategoryBook