Reference Library
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Higher-Order Perl
Mark Jason Dominus
An excellent book on functional programming using Perl. I am not a big fan of Perl, so I was initially sceptical, however this book's real value transcends the language used, and illustrates powerful and elegant concepts that can at least influence your designs elsewhere, if not outright applied in your language of choice. Well worth a read.
More Programming Pearls
Jon Bentley
A good follow-up to Programming Pearls, though perhaps not quite as good. Still focussing on efficient problem-solving, and clever thinking about interesting programming problems.
Programming Pearls
Jon Bentley
A great collection of short columns on programming problem-solving; that is, how to analyse the problem, pick an appropriate solution, and implement it efficiently with the right algorithms and data structures. I once had a manager who was very surprised when he tried out what he thought was a reasonably hard interview question on me, and I came up with the answer he was looking for immediately. I explained it was basically covered in Chapter 1 of Programming Pearls. After a pause, he said that testing for whether or not someone had read this book was just as useful.
Expert C Programming
Peter van der Linden
A good second reference book on C (after, of course, The C Programming Language). Interesting and easy to read, with a good number of small gems of C wisdom (e.g. when are pointers and arrays not equivalent?). Perhaps getting a little dated, but worthwhile nonetheless.
Coders at Work
Peter Seibel
A series of fascinating interviews with fascinating people. Peter Seibel brings his own strong programming background to bear in the interviews, resulting in a really technically in-depth conversation that is the next best thing to asking the masters questions yourself.
The Algorithm Design Manual
Steven Skiena
The book (old edition available online) from which I really learned about algorithms. Clear, concise, practical, and overall excellent. It's also been strongly recommended by someone whose opinion carries much more weight than mine: Steve Yegge listed it an essential tool in a blog post about how to get a job at Google.
Managing Humans
Michael Lopp
An entertaining and breezy guide full of hard-won software project management wisdom. The author is perhaps more widely known as Rands
from his blog Rands in Repose
, where a lot of the material from this book has its origins.
The C Programming Language
Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie
THE ultimate reference book for the C language. This is one of the very few books I take with me when I travel for extended periods of time. It's not meant as an introductory text to the language, but if you are serious about using or just knowing C, buy the book already.
Introduction to Statistical Thought
Michael Lavine
A creative-commons licensed introductory work on statistics, with an emphasis on the underlying concepts rather than practical implementation details. Covers the underlying theoretical ideas of some machine learning and statistical inference concepts, but the primary focus is statistical thought on its own.
The Elements of Statistical Learning
Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Jerome Friedman
Excellent book on data mining, machine learning, and statistical prediction methods. Covers a wide range of both supervised and unsupervised techniques.