Out of their minds & Programmer's at work

I started with a book called Out Of Their Minds : The Lives And Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists few months ago but because of lots of disturbances in between, could not finish it completely. And when my librarian called me asking for that book, I had to return it. I fairly read that one but completing it would have been more fun. So, that books tells a story about 15 greatest computer scientists who, with their fundamental research gave a new dimension to the world of computers. Everyone of the mentioned scientist holds a Turing Award for their great contribution in the field of computer science. The book is exhilarating and engrosses a reader with small anecdotes of the life of these scientists. I was surprised to know that many of them earlier had a lot of different interests other than computers. Many of them came across computers at the time when they had done nothing promising in their lives, someone learned computers to earn money some of them just wanted to try out few things. Out of the one's that I read, Donald Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra were the most appealing chaps.

While returning this book, I took another one called Programmer's at Work which is a collection of interviews of some great programmer's of all times. The most common thread which they share is that all of them loved mathematics and had a great ability to simplify things at the deepest possible level. These guys tell us some of the TODO's which they followed before writing any program. I am currently reading this book and enjoying it very much. Seems like there are a lot of things that I don't do which these great people were practicing since the start of their career !!!