Recommended Computer Science Papers

by Madeleine Thompson, originally written 2018–12–09, last updated 2019–12-14

theory

• On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, by Alan Turing (1936)
• A Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon (1948)
• Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, by John McCarthy (1960)
• Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages, by Christopher Strachey (1967)
• Reflections on Trusting Trust, by Ken Thompson (1984)
• A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Jürgen Schmidhuber (1997)

distributed systems

• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System, by Leslie Lamport (1978)
• The Part-Time Parliament, by Leslie Lamport (1998)
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, by Jeffrey Dean and and Sanjay Ghemawat (2004)
• The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems, by Mike Burrows (2006)
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, by Fay Chang et al (2006)
• Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store, by Giuseppe DeCandia et al (2007)
• Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database, by James C. Corbett et al (2013)
• The Design and Implementation of Modern Column-Oriented Database Systems, by Daniel Abadi et al (2013)
• Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate's Opinion, by Pat Helland (2016)

other

• How Complex Systems Fail, by Richard Cook (2000)
• A Layered Grammar of Graphics, by Hadley Wickham (2010)