Reposting a dead post which should not have been dead, from abecedarius:
These had high I-want-to-read-itosity, I thought:
Abelson and diSessa, Turtle Geometry
Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Aho and Weinberger and Kernighan, The AWK Programming Language
Andrew Appel, Compiling With Continuations
Jon Bentley, More Programming Pearls
Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls
Leo Brodie, Thinking FORTH
W. H. Burge, Recursive Programming Techniques
Carriero and Gelernter, How to Write Parallel Programs
A. K. Dewdney, The New Turing Omnibus
Edsger Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming
Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Computation
Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer
Friedman and Wand and Haynes, Essentials of Programming Languages [1st edition]
James F. Gimpel, Algorithms in Snobol4
Paul Graham, On Lisp
Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
Grune and Jacobs, Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide
Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine
Kernighan and Pike, The Practice of Programming
Kernighan and Pike, The Unix Programming Environment
Kernighan and Plauger, Software Tools in Pascal
Donald Knuth, Literate Programming
Glenn Krasner (editor), Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice
Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work
Wm Leler, Constraint Programming Languages
Liskov and Guttag, Abstraction and Specification in Program Development
Peter Norvig, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming
Chris Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures
Richard O'Keefe, The Craft of Prolog
P. J. Plauger, Programming on Purpose I. (and II and III)
P. J. Plauger, The Standard C Library
Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface
Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Toby Segaran, Programming Collective Intelligence
Toffoli and Margolus, Cellular Automata Machines
Niklaus Wirth, Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler
Witten, Moffat, & Bell, Managing Gigabytes
(mostly from my old list at http://wry.me/~darius/personal/books.html)
Why is Darius Bacon's account dead? I just flipped showdead back on to check, and it's his first dead comment. Seriously, WTF?
Skipping stuff commented on elsewhere:
While _The New Turing Omnibus_ is probably nothing too surprising to people here (at least not the subset that also hangs out on LtU, etc.), it's got a lot of approachable 2-5 page summaries of many major topics in CS.
_The Craft of Prolog_ is quite good, though perhaps of less interest to non-Prologers. _The Art of Prolog_ is essential, however. It's an SICP-caliber book, focused entirely on declarative programming, constraint programming, DSLs, etc.
_Compiling with Continuations_ rocks. It's an ML treatment of CPS-as-an-IR, like Steele's _RABBIT_ and Krantz et al.'s _Orbit_.
