🐯 Princeton CS unofficial reading list (Spring 2025)
←Fall 2024 | Fall 2025→
This is an unofficial list of books that are recommended in Spring 2025 computer science classes at Princeton
The books marked with a ✨ are ones I’ve been interested enough in to read at length
| Freshman level | |
|---|---|
| Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach COS 126 |
● Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach by Sedgewick & Wayne |
| Sophomore level | |
|---|---|
| Intro. to Programming Systems COS 217 |
● C Programming: A Modern Approach by K.N. King ● ARM 64-Bit Assembly Language by Pyeatt & Ughetta ● ✨ The Practice of Programming✨ by Kernighan & Pike ● Linux Pocket Guide: Essential Commands by Daniel J. Barrett |
| Algorithms & Data Structures COS 226 - 🌆 my notes |
● Algorithms by Sedgewick & Wayne |
| Reasoning About Computation COS 240 |
● Mathematics for Computer Science by Lehman, Leighton & Meyer |
| Junior level | |
|---|---|
| Intro. to Machine Learning COS 324 |
● Introduction to Machine Learning by Arora, Park, Jacob & Chen ● An Introduction to Statistical Learning by James, Witten, Hastie & Tibshirani ● Speech & Language Processing by Jurafsky & Martin ● Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Sutton & Barto ● ✨ Mathematics for Machine Learning ✨ by Deisenroth, Faisal & Ong ● Deep Learning by Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville ● Introduction to Probability by Blitzstein & Hwang ● Learning Data Science: Data Wrangling, Exploration, Visualization & Modeling with Python by Lau, Gonzalez & Nolan ● Pattern Recognition & Machine Learning by Christopher M. Bishop ● Introduction to Machine Learning by Etienne Bernard |
| Advanced Programming Techniques COS 333 |
● ✨ The Practice of Programming ✨ by Kernighan & Pike ● Python in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference by Martelli, Ravenscroft, Hoden & McGuire ● Flask Web Development: Developing Web Applications with Python by Miguel Grinberg ● JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Master the World’s Most-Used Programming Language by David Flanagan ● Beginning Software Engineering by Rod Stephens |
| Senior level | |
|---|---|
| Intro. to Machine Translation COS 401 / LIN 304 / TRA 301 |
● Readings in Machine Translation by Nirenburg, Somers & Wilks ● Neural Machine Translation by Philipp Koehn ● Speech & Language Processing by Jurafsky & Martin |
| Operating Systems COS 417 |
● Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau & Arpaci-Dusseau |
| Distributed Systems COS 418 |
● The Go Programming Language by Donovan & Kernighan ● Distributed Systems: Principles & Paradigms by Tanenbaum & van Steen ● Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems: Building High-Assurance Applications & Cloud-Hosted Services by Kenneth P. Birman |
| Information Security COS / ECE 432 |
● Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems by Ross Anderson ● Computer Security by Dieter Gollmann ● The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn ● Practical Cryptography by Ferguson & Schneier ● Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way by Viega & McGraw ● The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications by Michal Zalewski |
| Intro. to Reinforcement Learning COS 435 / ECE 433 |
● Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning by Miguel Morales ● An Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning by Francois-Lavet, Henderson, Islam, Bellemare & Pineau ● Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Sutton & Barto ● Reinforcement Learning: Theory& Algorithms by Agarwal, Jiang, Kakade & Sun |
| Economics & Computation COS 445 |
● Game Theory, Alive by Karlin & Peres ● Networks, Crowds & Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World by Easley & Kleinberg ● Algorithmic Game Theory by Nisam, Roughgarden, Tardos & Vazirani ● Handbook of Computational Social Choice by Brandt, Conitzer, Endriss, Lang & Procaccia |
| Innovating Across Technology, Business & Marketplaces COS / EGR 448 |
● In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works & Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy ● The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos & the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone ● The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz ● Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer & Venture Capitalist by Feld & Mendelson ● The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions & Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher |
| Computer Architecture COS / ECE 475 |
● Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy & Patterson |
| Natural Language Processing COS 484 |
● Speech & Language Processing by Jurafsky & Martin ● Introduction to Natural Language Processing by Jacob Eisenstein ● Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing by Manning & Schutze |
| Neural Networks: Theory & Applications COS 485 |
● Dive Into Deep Learning by Zhang, Lipton, Li & Smola ● Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai & PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD by Howard & Gugger |
| Graduate level | |
|---|---|
| Advanced Computer Systems COS 518 |
See website for paper list |
| Great Moments in Computing COS / ECE 583 |
See website for paper list |
| Machine Behavior COS 598B |
See website for paper list |
| Cryptographic Proof Systems COS 598D |
● Foundations of Cryptography by Oded Goldreich See website for paper list |