[sdiy] (OT) theory of programming/philosophy of programming books?

[Olivier Gillet]

Philosophy of programming? Maybe "Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs".  The risk here is that it will make you fly so
high that it will take time to "close loop" back to embedded systems.
It will eventually happen.  Every time I looked at code written by
people with no CS training but a strong EE background what I noticed
the most was how little effort was spent defining and building
abstractions - maybe because in EE you won't deal with as many
abstraction layers than in software development (a programmer can
encapsulate some functionality in a class or procedure and never, ever
look at it.  An EE can't unfortunately bundle bits of circuits into
his own library of chips and reuse it at will ; or bundle chips and
call it a new chip...).  So I think there's something that can be
learnt from a book that presents CS as the art of building
abstractions and giving name to things.

Just learning a high level language which reads like pseudo-code
(scala, python...) + an algorithms book?  General knowledge of
algorithms and data structures is always useful.  Pops up all the time
when doing sequencing or MIDI processing!

I find books like "Programmers at Work" and "Coders at work" (the 80s
and 00s ones) very interesting read... but again, very far from the
realms of embedded stuff

Hard to think of something that will matter for embedded systems...
Maybe you should try to read a compiler book (classic textbook:
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools) to get a good feel as to
what your compiler will do with the code you throw at it?

Olivier