General References

Roads, Curtis. The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press, 1996.

This is a very thorough treatment of principles and applications. It is also the most up-to-date.

Dodge, Charles, and Jerse, Thomas A. Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition and Perfrmance. Shirmer Books, 1985.

An older book but still useful for fundamentals.

Moore, F. Richard. Elements of Computer Music. Prentice-Hall,1990.

A good survey book. Includes material on cmusic, the precursor to Csound.

Specific to Linux

Philips, Dave. The Book of Linux Music and Sound. No starch Press, 2000.

A little out of date now, but contains much valuable material, especially about Csound and a real-time front end, Cecilia.

Greenbaum, Ken and Barzel, Ronen. Audio Anecdotes. A. K. Peters Ltd. 2004.

This book is purposely platform-independent and contains a set of articles on different CM topics. . I reviewed it for the ACM.

Csound

Boulanger, Richard, Editor. The Csound book. MIT Press, 2000.

The definitive reference on Csound. Very deep, thorough account.

He has also written several tutorials. The 'toot' one is very good.

Barry Vercoe's tutorial is also useful.

Free Windows MIDI sequencers

I have downloaded three free MIDI sequencers for the Windows platform. They can be used as an alternative to Rosegarden, whoich is only avilable on the Linux platform. They are of varying size and quality. A simple, but fairly complete program is Massiva 1.0. Better, and bigger, is Anvil Studio. Both of these come with reasonable help systems. Anvil Studio has a window, visible all the time, with contextual help which is good for learning the program. The most complete, and the largest, is Music Studio Producer, but it has maddeningly incomplete documentation. You are basically on your own if you choose to use any of these.