Freely downloadable books by Niklaus Wirth.

I haven't been aware of the fact that quite a few books by Niklaus Wirth are available as free downloads by now. Among them are such classics as Programming in Modula-2, Algorithms and Data Structures, Compiler Construction, and Project Oberon, all of them either originally in/about Oberon, or adapted to Oberon.

These books have influenced me a lot. Niklaus Wirth's main strength is a focus on the essentials, which is especially apparent in his concise programming style. I can especially recommend Compiler Construction which basically contains all you need to know about compilers in a very thin book (unless you decide to make this your field of expertise), and Project Oberon which contains the complete source code of a full operating system (including a file system, a garbage collector, a GUI, and so on).

See also the ETH Oberon Home Page for more information about Oberon and related materials.

CDR 0 & 1 finalized.

The Common Lisp Document Repository (CDR) has finalized its first documents today. CDR 0 describes CDR and the CDR process itself, while CDR 1 is the CLOS MOP specification, as published as an appendix in The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Kiczales, des Rivières and Bobrow.

These CDRs were mostly test runs of the CDR process, although they are of course also useful in their own right. (The CLOS MOP had already been published over 15 years ago and has long been proven useful, so didn't really need an official "stamp.")

See the CDR website for more information.

Furthermore, we have set up a CDR Blog where we will post CDR-related announcements - actually the same ones as in the cdr-announce mailing list.