Turing's paper on computability was particularly hard to follow, for me, because he used these gothic-font upper-chase characters to name all sorts of objects, and all those characters looked kinda the same to me! I had to use auxiliary materials to be able to make my way through the paper. Today, I would recommend reading it with Charles Petzold's easy-to-follow book on the paper: https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...

Cook's paper on NP-completeness was also hard to follow (again, for me). As with Turing's paper, I had to use auxiliary materials to make my way. Today, I would recommend reading instead an introductory book on computational complexity that works through Cook's proof.

Shannon's paper is a work of art, clearly articulated and beautifully written. It's just not casual reading, to put it mildly.

Brin and Page's paper, and Codd's paper, are not hard to follow, at least as I remember them, but understanding Brin and Page's work requires some knowledge of Linear Algebra.

Thank you for sharing this on HN.