I have this book at home, have read it and although it covers a lot in a short volume, I didn't get out of it as much as I did out of C Programming: A Modern Approach by KN King.
Once I bought King's book, C made a lot more sense, the book was fun to read and follow. K&R's book was, to me, less "how & why" but more "how". Pointers, in particular, is what I enjoyed more in King's book. That chapter alone made buying the book worth its money.
Any book written by Charles Petzold is an enjoyable read, though particularly the non-MS specific titles Code and The Annotated Turing.
Java Concurrency in Practice (2006) is older but relevant and clearly describes concurrency on the JVM. A must read for any Java, Scala, Clojure, etc. software engineer; well-written, enjoyable, concise.
Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz is a fun read packed with good principles for working in Ruby that are applicable in general to object oriented programming.
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck is worth a read because the general principles are applicable to any OOP language.
Clean Code by Robert Martin is excellent but a time commitment. (If you had to pick between SICP and Clean Code because time is at a premium I'd err on the side of Clean Code for practicality. Writing maintainable code is paramount.)
The Joy of Clojure (Fogus/Houser) is excellent and mentally digestable even if you have no Lisp or Clojure background.
Knuth: he's an excellent writer with a sense of humor.
Anything coauthored by Kernighan is a good bet, though the material is not quite so ageless. Similar remarks for P.J. Plauger.
Norvig doesn't just write exquisite code, but good prose too.
I always liked Abelson & Sussman's style, even though it's more textbookish. Abelson also co-wrote Turtle Geometry, which is almost unknown these days and still eye-opening. (It's more of a math book than a programming one, but its point is to be both.)
Daniel Hillis: The Pattern on the Stone, The Connection Machine.
Seconding Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley. Although a bit dated, I reread this book for its insight in to problem solving. It is a great primer for programming problem interviews.
Check out the Stealing The Network series if you're into security -
it's a bunch of short stories about network security usually written from the POV of a hacker who's trying to gain access to a system. The stories are very tech-heavy to the point that parts of the stories are non-fiction, with huge excerpts from console sessions and the like.
Learning Perl is an excellent book. It's one of the reasons I still consider Perl a pretty good teaching and learning language, despite it's bad reputation among some programmers. All of the big O'Reilly books for Perl are truly excellent, in fact, and a big part of why O'Reilly developed such a reputation for excellence (which, I think, has faded somewhat in the past decade or so...at least for me...I don't tend to automatically choose the O'Reilly title, anymore, whereas that used to be what I always picked up first).
Great book, my first general purpose programming language was going to be Python but the book I was reading was so poorly written that I picked up Learning Perl and have been doing Perl all my career.
My favorite is Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. It's clear, concise, the railroad diagrams are super helpful, and from what I've seen of Crockford's lectures on YouTube, it also really captures his voice.
Programming in Lua by Roberto Ierusalimschy is one of the best introductions to any programming language. Hw writes the new version along with each language release now, on the grounds that if you cannot explain it right then the language feature probably needs fixing.
Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky is solid for learning the fundamentals of thinking in and writing lisp.
You may also enjoy Glass' Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, it's similar to Mythical Man Month (and cites it and overlaps in parts) but the focus is a bit wider, with many small essays on a particular problem in programming or management of programmers
More recent than most books mentioned here, but I found it remarkably well-written. Irrespective of what happens to Scala, this book has a good chance to be useful 10 years from now.
I love the one for iOS development. It's perfect even for people new to programming. Will you ever re-write the Andriod version to be just as beginner friendly? I would love to hand it off to my girlfriend so she can learn how to do apps. Right now it is harder to grok than the iOS one.
C# in Depth by Jon Skeet is amazing and is great to brush up your C# skills!
A word of warning though: it's excellent for developers with experience in .NET, but does not serve as an introduction to the language/framework. The knowledge is not easily applicable to other languages either. That aside - it is still the best programming book I've read thus far.
Eloquent Ruby is one of my favorite books, too. That book really motivated me to learn how programming languages work. Here are a few other books I found to be enjoyable and well-written:
Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong
Programming Elixir by Dave Thomas
Seven (more) Languages In Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate
Think Bayes, Think OS, How To Think Like A Functional Programmer (Think OCaml) and The Little Book of Semaphores by Allen B. Downey
The Elements of Computing Systems: http://www.nand2tetris.org. A great, fun, do it yourself projects with subtle hints to move forward. Helps you lay a good foundation for programming.
Helped me a lot when I ventured into 3D graphics and game programming.
This book made me understand that writing software is not just about creating opaque binaries with _stuff_ inside. It's also about what does this binary depends on, which symbols does it exports, how is it built, etc.
While on this subject, would anybody recommend a book in french? It would be for my nephew who is quite smart, high-school age, and knows java an python. I would like to expose him to something different: lisp, or functional programming.
Any suggestions on theory books (not exclusively on a language) that isn't too dense? Not looking for a textbook, but something that is a lighter read that can help me with the logical parts of programming.
Yo progg'n books — I'm really happy for you, I'll let you finish, but The Poignant Guide is one of the best books on programming of all time. One of the best of all time!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming-Language-Brian-Kernigh...