Geb Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid review

Overview

This book isn’t about computer science or music or cognitive science or biology or mathematics or linguistics or philosophy or artificial intelligence or art, it’s about all of these!

Content

Not only is GEB brilliant, it’s fascinating and sitting at crossroads of many interesting disciplines.

Site, it may be a bit dated since the time it was published (especially the part about artificial intelligence where there is a paradigm shift since then) but I’m willing to bet that it will nevertheless expand your mind and help you even when coding.

How does it relates to computer science?

Well, there’s the obvious obsession with recursion as recurring topic, deeper philosophical questions about machines and artificial intelligence.

By reading this book, you also learn about how everything relates to another and how similar patterns emerge wherever you look and also where you might not even expect it.

The book itself is organized in the same fashion following these principles of interrelatedness and surprises.

As a programmer, the most value you can get out it, outside from learning about all kinds of things, is going though an exercise of transposing knowledge and principles from one field to another which can be really useful since you’re often translating domain specific things into the more general field of computer science.

The author also makes it pleasant reading every topics by making them even more interesting with the use of stories, parables, analogies, anecdotes, images, art combined with crisp explanations.

But you do not get all the answers right away, the answers are something you uncover.

Actually, this isn’t a book, this is a journey.

The book can become complicated and a bit mathematical at times. This isn’t something you can read quickly without understanding since you will be lost pretty fast and will have to turn back pages.

Verdict

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone curious, not only about computer science but a wide range of topics.

I have also heard about another book from the same author that is more accessible, it’s called I Am a Strange Loop and is supposed to illustrate the same concepts.