What Good Technical Books Adorn Your Library?

bluefoxlucid asks: "Lately I've been looking into technical books, and have come to the conclusion that there are a lot of useful books out there containing information that could be useful to me. To my alarm, I've found that many of these titles are not in my local public library! This requires action; I must build my own library, and actually use that bookshelf in my room! But, without a way to sample the books, how should I know which to buy? What (mainly non-fiction) recommendations would you make for anyone who would fall into the Slashdot audience to read?" "Here I present a list of books I have and am looking into buying, with ISBN for each as well; in case anyone wants to know anything about a particular title, the objects I own are accompanied by a '*' while those on order stand next to a '#'. I haven't read all those I own; particularly, I skimmed Silence on the Wire and only read a chapter of Game Design: Secrets of the Sages. These range from

Hobby. These books have hobbyist value, giving tips for making useful things out of other less useful things. These range from ballistics to shoving a survival kit in a watch. Nothing on rail guns, gauss guns, sonic canons, particle accelerators, magnetic drive launchers, ionic wind engines, or any of the other nifty electromagnetic projects you can create; maybe in the future I'll find something.

• The Art of the Catapult (ISBN 1556525265)
• Backyard Ballistics (ISBN 1556523750)
• Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks (ISBN 0596003145)
• Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things (ISBN 0740738593)#
• Sneakier Uses for Everyday Things (ISBN 0740754963)#
• The Unofficial MacGyver How-to Handbook: Revised 2nd Edition (ISBN 1887641475)

Computers, Hacking, Security. These books give technical puzzles or information for programmers and security experts. These include an outdated Assembly book and a Game Design book, just because I had them and programmers and game designers may find use for this information. I should probably find a more up-to-date Assembly book that can be used with gas on Linux.

• 1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k (ISBN 0672327279)
• The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element Of Security (ISBN 076454280X)
• The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers (ISBN 0764569597)
• Assembler Inside and Out (ISBN 0078818427)*
• Game Design: Secrets of the Sages (ISBN 1575952572)*
• Hacker's Delight (ISBN 0201914654)
• Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (ISBN 1593270070)*
• Programming Challenges (ISBN 0387001638)
• Puzzles for Hackers (ISBN 1931769451)#
• Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering (ISBN 0764574817)
• Silence on the Wire (ISBN 1593270461)*

Mathematics. These books are mathematics related. Actually there's only one here, I was going to throw it in the above section and label it 'Technical' but the Psychology and Neuroscience stuff below is also 'Technical.'

• Statistics Hacks: Tips & Tools for Measuring the World and Beating the Odds (ISBN 0596101643)

Psychology and Neuroscience. These pieces are interesting because they explain the brain and learning, and how to use yours better. They may possibly have been more amusing if written by Q; the authors don't appear to want to remind you that you're primitive beings that can only expand your realm of thinking for fractions of a second at a time. Sadly, they were written by sane individuals and not alien beings who happen to be egomaniacs.

• Mind Hacks (ISBN 0596007795)#
• Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain (ISBN 0596101538)#

Humor and Nonsense. Funny stuff only a nerd could enjoy... but you know, if there's ever a Class 4 zombie invasion, you'll be ready. None of this stuff is useful, unless your brain is burning out and you need something to distract you while it relaxes and repairs itself; what better way than to read up on how to enter a burning building or choke a man with your bare thighs?

• The Action Hero's Handbook (ISBN 193168605X)
• The Action Heroine's Handbook (ISBN 1931686688)
• Prank University (ISBN 0307338436)
• The Superman Handbook (ISBN 1594741131)
• The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (ISBN 1400049628)*

That's it for my list. Surprised? Not only is it short but I actually own only a few of the items that have caught my eye! And yes, all of the humor is from ThinkGeek; that's where I found Hacking: The Art of Exploitation in the first place, which started all this. With the exception of Mind Hacks and The Zombie Survival Guide, none of the '*' and '#' items were found in a library search. I searched on some of the others as well, with no good results. Some of this stuff is in the Library of Congress; but a good number of the ones I searched for weren't.

This leaves my options for discovering new and interesting reads pretty limited—I can buy the books, or harass Slashdot and see if any of you actually have something useful. Rather than try to tailor your responses to me, just go wild; I'm sure anyone in any other technical field besides just programming would appreciate knowing about little gems they'll not find in a library anywhere."

Comments

Smells like desperation

[c0d3h4x0r]

Someone was asked to put together a Christmas list, weren't they?

Re:Smells like desperation

[itwerx]

Someone was asked to put together a Christmas list, weren't they?

Mod parent up!!!!!!!!!
      (Mine just got a heck of a lot easier! :)

Expert C# 2005 Business Objects

[schmidtjas]

Very good starting point for developing large distributed apps

"Adorn"?

[adavies42]

Someone give you a thesaurus recently?

Re:"Adorn"?

[itwerx]

Someone give you a thesaurus recently?

More likely they simply managed to graduate high school. Heck, there might even be a bit of graduate school involved! (The not-so-subtle message here being that some schooling is actually useful in the real world, especially when communicating with a reasonably intelligent audience).

Re:"Adorn"?

[richdun]

a reasonably intelligent audience

HA!

Re:"Adorn"?

[bobthecow]

Yeah, see adorn is not really the correct word to use here. Or at least it's a very weird use of the word. I go with the thesaurus theory.

Re:"Adorn"?

[itwerx]

Yeah, see adorn is not really the correct word to use here.

Too true! Tends to evoke images of doilies, or flowers or something.
      (Unless of course the submitter has no intention of ever actually reading them, in which case the terminology is sadly apropos. :)

Re:"Adorn"?

[macmastery]

Words bad.
Numbers good.

Algorithms textbook

[frenetic3]

can't go too far without mentioning the canonical algorithms textbook --

Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest

i read a ton of business books too -- maybe i'll post some of my favorites in a little bit.

-fren

Re:Algorithms textbook

[frenetic3]

if you're a tech entrepreneur, you might find these interesting:

guy kawasaki's ten favorite books

definitely second guy's suggestions of influence, crossing the chasm and innovator's dilemma; i'd also include the tipping point and blink (both by malcolm gladwell, quick reads -- kinda fluffy but interesting), seth godin's all marketers are liars, high tech startup by john nesheim, emotional intelligence by daniel goleman, and windows internals by mark russinovich, and for web design don't make me think is pretty good... what else -- i like joel spolsky's stuff, particularly user interface design for programmers, joel on software, and best software writing I is interesting too. paul graham's hackers and painters is also an interesting read if you haven't read his essays online.

n.b. i was logged into amazon at the time of copying those links, and judging by the length of the urls, there's probably some referrer shenanigans in there. if that bothers you, feel free to (un)mangle the link (i don't really care about making 17 cents or whatever if someone clicks one of the links).

-fren

Re:Algorithms textbook

[El Cubano]

can't go too far without mentioning the canonical algorithms textbook --

Don't forget Stein.

On another note, the authors are awesome. I thought I had found a mistake (or inconsistency) in the book's explanation of an algorithm. I sent an email to the bug reporting address. Within a couple of days Dr. Cormen replied and told me that I was wrong :-) I restated my position and tried to explain to him why I thought the explanation in the text was wrong. He spent a couple of days trading emails with me about it and explaining in detail the rationale for the way it was explained in the book. Anyhow, he finally got me straightened out. I was most impressed since that was the first time I had ever received a reply from the author of a text book about a potential problem I had reported. I was even more impressed when he spent quite a bit of his own time to make sure that I properly understood why the text was correct.

Re:Algorithms textbook

[Matje]

if you enjoy reading about user interface design than (Tufte) probably should be included in your list.

cheers,

mat

Re:Algorithms textbook

[Anonymous Coward]

CLR is a very good book, but I've always considered AHU (Aho, Hopcroft, Ullman) to be better. It's more rigorous, in my opinion. Another good algorithms book is "Fundamentals of Computer Algorithms" by Horowitz and Sahni, which I would rate just slightly below CLR.

Re:Algorithms textbook

[computational super]

I don't know about that suggestion - that is an excellent book, if you're taking a course and it's the textbook. If you're not taking a course, you're probably not going to get much out of it, because there's no way to find out what the answers to any of the exercises are (and considering the number of "the proof of this is given in exercise 12.1-3" or, "see exercise 34.1-5 for the solution to this problem" cookies in this text, you're missing a lot if you happen to be stuck on a given exercise). Infuriatingly, although the author(s) publish a solutions guide for professors only (in case the professor is teaching a course he doesn't understand, I presume), they're openly hostile to students who might want to double-check their own answers against an authoritative source (or maybe they themselves can't solve all of the problems...)?

BTW, I'd highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated (or anything else by Richard Stevens), Advanced Unix Programming, and Applied Cryptography.

No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

If more than 1% of the books you own, or more than one of the non-programming books you own, contains the word "hack" in the title, you're a pompous ninny. The one exception is for MIT people: anything prank-related doesn't count against the limit.

I was going to except Nethack players, also, but realized they don't deserve it.

I've got one

[Archangel Michael]

Anarchist Cookbook

Seriously the smoke bombs alone are worth it.

Re:I've got one

[PachmanP]

but won't that get you arrested...at least that's what a recent /. article said.(couldn't find it...)

Re:I've got one

[plopez]

Seriously the smoke bombs alone are worth it.

And many of the others will kill you. Though I suppose it is a good way to cull the herd...

Refactoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts

Re:Refactoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Add to Refactoring:

Code Complete 2
Test-Driven Development: By Example

I applied what I learned from these three books to my C programming and I think the quality has improved dramatically. They are books about OOP, but you can still apply them to C, even without inheritance and even without using function pointers. Learning to rely on a C compiler inliner does wonders for your code.

Just be careful not to become overly rabid about the new processes you'll learn, six months later you'll look back and realize you probably went a bit overboard. At least, that's what happened to me.

Who could forget...

[Bugs42]

-The Art of Computer Programming - Knuth -The C Programming Language - K&R -Anything from O'Reilly

Re:Who could forget...

[Sangui5]

Second on the Knuth and K&R. Especially the Knuth -- the level of detail is beyond belief. If Knuth has anything about it, he has everything you ever wanted to know about it; like the 15 jillion different ways to do a hash table. K&R unfortunately is covering a fairly simple topic, so it doesn't get used as much (actually, use it for lending more than anything).

Besides Knuth, the book I use the most is "Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach", by Hennessy & Patterson, although it isn't adorning my shelf so much as much as my desk. If you care about the architecture side of things at all, Hennessy & Patterson is "the" book; plus the later editions cover relatively modern processors, like P4 Netburst. Not to be confused with Patterson & Hennessy, which is a more introductory book, and not nearly as well written.

A few other goodies are Numerical Recipes in C (for the rare cases when Knuth is lacking), and a lot of books by W. Richard Stevens, William Stallings, and Andrew Tanenbaum.

Re:Who could forget...

[ignavusinfo]

there once was a time when i'd agree with "Anything from O'Reilly" -- nowadays their titles are hit or miss and aimed more at the mid to low tech market rather than in days of old. (and there are real gaps in their library. no really great LDAP books, for instance, and little in the realm of obj-c/cocoa, no updated mod_perl v2 book, little in the way of C, C++ and so on, but lots of annoyance books.)

but on a more upbeat note, along with K&R i'd have to nominate:

• graham's _on lisp_ no matter what language you hack in
• steele's cltl2 as an example of a really well written and highly readable reference,
• singh's _mac os x internals_, if only because it's such a fun read,
• bentley's _programming pearls_, maybe for sentimental reasons,
• friedman & felleisen's _the little lisper_ (now schemer), the book i recommend to non-programmers who want to understand what programming's like.

Re:Who could forget...

[Kevin Stevens]

I disagree on the Knuth. I don't really know anyone who has made anything more than a tiny dent into any of them. Most programmers I know that actually own it use it mostly for shelf candy. Maybe if you are into pure computer science, this is a great book, but most of us have work to do, and Knuth is way too dense. There are better and more practical books out there.

Re:Who could forget...

[Otter]

I disagree on the Knuth.

I'd disagree on the K&R -- it's a beloved historical artifact, but long superceded as an introductory C text.

Re:Who could forget...

[Sangui5]

If you're sitting down to read through Knuth all at once, well, gads that is painful to try. They really aren't books to learn the concepts from, but rather serve as a reference for a wide variety of basic topics. Although there are better books on all of the individual topics, Knuth covers a lot in just three volumes. True, volume 1 is of limited practical use, but I've often referenced 2 and 3, for when I needed custom random number generation, custom hash tables, had to deal with unusual sorts, and as a general data structure reference. I feel confident that I'll use it for other things in the future. Knuth probably is of limited use to somebody who finds that they can always use the standard libraries, but if the STL Map classes are just too slow for your particular application, or if you need to sort a 10 GB set of data (whups, guess the system quicksort() isn't going to work... now what's the best way to do an on-disk sort?), Knuth is invaluable. As for being too dense, well, all of the big-O analysis and whatnot explain to you why the various algorithms and data structures work the way they do. If you don't understand how things work and why they behave the way they do, you are likely to make poor choices.

Re:Who could forget...

[Intron]

A copy of Knuth is worthless without some practical reference textbooks to go with it. It's one thing to be able to find an algorithm written in MIX, and quite another to create the best possible implementation using the most up-to-date tools.

That's why I'm never without my copy of True

There's only one...

[__aaclcg7560]

"Hackers" by Steven Levy

NOTE: You know you're growing old when the book you read 22 years ago in hardback is now a Penguin Classic paperback with the distinctive orange cover.

Books you say?

[KillerCow]

Unix in a Nutshell

That's it. Everything else I can look up online, or check out from a library.

Current library books:

Beyond Fear
The Art of the Start

Re:Books you say?

[Phillup]

Everything else I can look up online, or check out from a library.

And what is in that book you can't look up online?

(I have the book and haven't looked at it in at least a decade.)

Re:Books you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until the 4th edition, UNIX In A Nutshell had a very good section on Text Formatting, which had lots of material on troff/nroff, including preprocessors like tbl, pic, and eqn. A lot of that material is hard to find online, especially stuff about the 'me' macro. Every UNIX/Linux geek should know how to use troff (or groff, the GNU version -- about 99% of the troff material in the book is valid for groff). I don't understand why O'Reilly decided to drop that material from the 4th edition. Luckily, I still have my 3rd edition handy for when I need to lookup something for troff (which is often).

Re:Books you say?

[Phillup]

Up until the 4th edition, UNIX In A Nutshell had a very good section on Text Formatting, which had lots of material on troff/nroff, including preprocessors like tbl, pic, and eqn.

Don't know which edition mine is. It was printed in 1994 and has all of that tho...

Still, I can find that info online... or on my system in the form of man or info pages.

Sure..

[Dan East]

My favorite is Effective Googling.

Okay, so I made that book up. Anyways, I find myself using hardly any formal reference material at this point (during software development). I used to consult MSDN regularly, and sometimes I still do if Google directs me there.

Dan East

Re:Sure..

[goarilla]

mmm i think it's still handy to have an hands-on guide or something as a
computer screen doesn't read as well as regular paper imho
Ever tried to read a 300 page book of a crt screen?
it isn't comfortable !

Re:Sure..

[Dan East]

I've not actually read a book on my laptop, but I have read many dozens of books on my Asus Pocket PC (240x320 display). I've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy (including the Hobbit) twice, Da Vinci code, all the Harry Potters, and dozens of older works (most everything by Jules Verne, many of them twice), Moby Dick, etc.

So no, I wouldn't have any problem at all reading a 300 page book on a PC / notebook.

Dan East

O'Reilly Press

[El Torico]

Nearly anything by O'Reilly Press.

Re:O'Reilly Press

[Midnight Warrior]

Nearly anything by O'Reilly Press.

But specifically, Sed & Awk, and the latest Perl Nutshell book (3rd edition). A healthy subscription to alt.binaries.ebook.technical is also a must.

Make magazine

[Noksagt]

The quarterly Make magazine fits nicely with the other hobbyist books.

Amazon has subscriptions and back issues.

Sam's series

[beef curtains]

I've got a bunch of the "Sam's Teach Yourself in Days/Hours" books...I find them to be a great way to dive into a completely new language.

Sam's PL/SQL & Java books have saved my bacon many times over, and I never would've gotten my website up & running without Sam's PHP & MySQL books.

For some reason, these click for me, more so than the O'Reilly "...In a Nutshell" books.

Why just Technical?

[0racle]

I like Green Eggs and Ham. Yes I have it somewhere. In fact, I might go read it right now.

It taught me how to form sentences.

Re:Why just Technical?

[bladesjester]

I was kind of wondering the same thing.

There are several non-tech books that I'd add to the list, but they're not for everyone. Besides being a software developer, among other things, I am also a student of strategy and find that it has quite a few applications in circumstances other than combat (though it certainly helps there as well).

Seven Military Classics of Ancient China
Thirty-six Strategies Of Ancient China
The Prince
Romance of the Three Kingdoms - While a bit on the long side, I find it to be an excellent read and it also gives examples of some of the concepts from the first two books in the list in use.

Then, on the lighter side of things, I'd toss in things like the following two (Carlin is always good for a laugh as well as to get you to think about some things)
Brain Droppings
Napalm and Silly Putty

Safari

[wikinerd]

Get a Safari subscription.

Re:Safari

[greg1104]

Second that. The new all-you-can-eat plan from Safari has saved me a fortune in book buying, and I have to lug a lot less stuff around to be productive as well.

Libraries order what you ask them too

[majortom1981]

I work at a library and We order books that you ask so if you have a book in mind ask and we will order it. This will be a fun topic to read since there will be a lot of misinformation on it.

Re:Libraries order what you ask them too

[FLEB]

I'd say I've taken advantage of that fact to trade in buying for waiting on a number of books, but my amazing library fines amassed over the years have tipped the scale back toward "buying", I fear.

"Patterns of Plausible Insight", G. Polya

[Dr. Zowie]

Polya's magnum opus is a practical manual on how to train yourself to have good hunches. I have many more authoritative books on specific subjects but this one is my all-around favorite.

Reference Books

[Noksagt]

Pocket Ref has been lauded as a "shirtpocket database of tech info" It has an amazing number of diverse charts and tables for unit conversion, materials properties, standards used by different countries, etc. Combine that with a book of engineering formulas (like this one) and you're set.

A few suggestions

[MythMoth]

I've tried to keep these sufficiently un-obvious that you might not have them. Hopefully I've succeeded with most of them, though Penrose and Brookes works are well known - though nothing like as well known as they should be.

The Inventions of Daedalus
The Further Inventions of Daedalus
These two books are just fabulous. The author, David E. H. Jones comes up with far fetched inventions, immaculately thought through and presented. Sometimes they then come true - he predicted buckyballs rather handily, for example. The books are collections of his columns for Nature and other publications, with additional notes and cartoons. Absolutely lovely, but sadly out of print - you'll have to snap up second hand copies quick. I'd love it if Jones did a new edition, or better yet another book!

The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose.
An exposition of weak AI, but taking in computer science and particle physics. Pretty epic, though I have trouble with his conclusions.

The Man Who Knew Too Much - Stephen Inwood.
A life of Robert Hooke, a multi-talented scientist of the 17th century. Fascinating insight into the perspective of a friend or acquaintance of Newton, Christopher Wren, and Edmund Halley.

Mind Children - Hans Moravec
Musings on the future of robot and human intelligence, with particular thoughts about how we might "upload" our minds to computers. Not as silly a book as I make it sound, I think.

The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brookes
The truth about project management. Written in 1975 and we still haven't learnt.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (Case Studies in Common Lisp) - Peter Norvig
Lots of hands on stuff, plenty of examples, and a good introduction to Lisp into the bargain. I loved it at college, and I've just bought myself a copy after all these years (the Library at University didn't see their copy very often while I was there).

Hacking Matter - Wil McCarthy (not a typo, it really is "Wil")
This is great, but I have to say I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the entertaining semi-humorous science fiction novel The Collapsium that's based to a large part around the more speculative parts of this non-fiction book. But regardless, it opened my eyes to a number of possibilities; even if they come to naught I appreciate his voice on the subject.

Thanks for the excellent question - I'll enjoy reading the other contributions to this thread.

Re:A few suggestions

[jthill]

The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose.

Bah. The man fell for the chestnut about neurons not understanding Chinese. He understands physics, not computers, but even so he should have been able to see that trick for what it is.

Re:A few suggestions

[tootlemonde]

The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brookes
The truth about project management. Written in 1975 and we still haven't learnt.

If you like the The Mythical Man Month, you'll love the 20th Anniversay Edition, in which Brooks candidly reports where he was wrong in the original.

He sticks with his thesis that there's no "silver bullet" to speed up software development but he admits his project planning advice has been largely superceded.

The book is still indespensable but I would add one other revision to his thesis that large projects are fundamentally different from small projects. For those of us who are only involved in small projects, it is interesting how much of what he describes applies to writing a 10-line shell script.

Mod Parent Up

[Noksagt]

Polya is a genius. He is concise and yet insightful. His How to Solve It is also recommended. It is geared towards mathematics, but can be applied elsewhere. His methodology can be summed up as:

1. Understand the problem.
2. Plan
3. Execute the plan
4. Look back (check your work)

Re:Mod Parent Up

[kfg]

His How to Solve It is also recommended.

I've been clutching my copy to my breast for about 30 years now. Perhaps not the ideal way to make use of the volume, but to each his own.

KFG

A few in the "Computers" category:

[dextromulous]

I saw TAOCP and K&R mentioned already, so here's a couple more from the bookshelf:

• Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment - Stevens
• Unix Network Programming - Stevens
• Computer Networks - Tanenbaum

O'Reilly Press-beacon

[Anonymous Coward]

Ambient Findability by Peter Morville.

My top shelf

[grapeape]

The shelf next to my computer has:

The C Programing Language by Kernighan and Ritchie
The Linux Bible from Wiley and Sons
Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson
Cryptonomicron by Neil Stephenson (autographed)
The Differencial Engine by William Gibson
Tricks With Your Head by Mac King
The Tarbell Course in Magic vol 1&2
Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein

Re:My top shelf

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, that's "The Difference Engine".

And why don't you have the rest of the Tarbell's?

My touchstone Heinlein book is "The Door Into Summer".

Re:My top shelf

[grapeape]

Sorry I was at work and for some reason thats what came to mind.

BTW for those that arent familiar with it, since its not one of his more popular novels. The Difference Engine is a rather odd book less cyberpunk, more like steampunk. Its an alternate past where Lord Byron takes power in England and Charles Babbage fully realized the potential of the mechanical computer. Basically what happens is the Internet revolution takes place in the 19th century. Its a good book, check it out if you can find it and like Gibsons style.

I have the rest of the Tarbell's (except v12) but those are the two I happen to have on the shelf at the moment, the rest are in the bookcase.

The Door into Summer is great, love pretty much all the Heinlein books but Citizen is special to me, first it was my dads and is a first edition, second it was my first exposure to Science Fiction.

Re:My top shelf

[grapeape]

Actually that volume 7 that im missing...I have another 4 volume set next to it but its not Tarbell its Mark Wilson.

CRC Handbook

[malvidin]

I don't think any technical library could be complete without the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

Lame List

[Usquebaugh]

I was thinking of all the books I've collected over the years for reference including Knuth, Tufte, SICP, SICM etc etc Maybe some early texts Plato, Aristole, Socrates, Newton etc Or early computer papers Turing, Church, Shannon etc etc What do I find on the list a bunch of how to books, that is how to with little or no understanding. (Bleh)

To the OP put down these comics and go and research something to first principles, just one interesting subject e.g. gunpowder or steel or calculus. Find out not only how the stuff is made today and in the past, but also the reasons for the change the people involved, who was the monk who first wrote it down in the western world and why were the chinese ahead of us. The chemistry and the physics involved, how much gunpowder do you need to knock down a wall vs. how much gasoline. To get a good foundation should take no longer than three months of daily application. At the end of which you'll know a lot about gunpowder but also a lot more about how to find and use information to garner knowledge. The latter is far more valuble skill than what's available in the how to for dummies.

The idea is that you don't stop at one subject but you take an interest in something related e.g. machining or poisons. This leads to other areas. Each time you'll reach understanding a little quicker. After a year or so any new subject should be childs play for you to grasp and manipulate.

Re:Lame List

[1iar_parad0x]

This is assuming one has a survey knowledge of the sciences. Thanks, to MIT's OCW and webcast.berkeley.edu (among other various colleges) you can find material on the introductory level for everything.

Some less obvious sites:

modern physics (not too bad)
http://modphys.ucsd.edu/2dw05/video/video.html

organic chemistry (I haven't watched these at all)
http://chem241.blogspot.com/
http://www2.haverford.edu/wintnerorganicchem/

Before you judge the OP too hard, remember that learning (especially the autodidactic kind) should be fun. Not everyone wants to have gun powder skills +5. For whatever it's worth I agree with you, but without a basic knowledge of chemistry, the study of gun powder and munitions is going to be superficial at best.

Re:Lame List

[failedlogic]

I the only one concerned by your post? You mention to the OP that he should immerse himself at being an expert in gunpowder, machining and poisons as "examples". What kind of contraption are you suggesting that he build in the next 18 monhts? And why pick these subjects out of the possible thousands available? I'm sure whatever you have in mind has already been featured in MAD magazine in a Spy vs Spy comic strip, or, in a Road Runner episode!!!

Re:No offense...nethack rulz

[dmeranda]

What do you want to read? h
You begin reading the book called h0vv 2 h0xxr.
You become confused.
Your intelligence drains away.
Continue reading? y
You feel like a pompous ninny.

The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection ...

[hattig]

This book is pretty good, and has proved useful in several situations in the past. Of course I found out afterwards they weren't zombies, but hey, my intake of LSD in the 70s surely didn't contribute!

i.e., yeah, it's a good fun read, get someone to get it for you as an extra Christmas or Birthday present.

My favorite technical book

[drinkypoo]

The UNIX Programming Environment, by Kernighan and Pike. This is the book that really taught me to appreciate Unix. It's also got a nice introduction to ANSI C. Definitely a more beginner level book, I must admit, but I'd say it's the single tech book I've got the most mileage out of.

a couple more

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting Things Done, by David Allen (a guide to increasing personal productivity, appeals to geeks because of its simple, flexible "framework-y" principles)

Database In Depth, by Chris Date (a very short [250pp] book that explains the relational model, which is the only complete model for data management. If just 1/10 of the people in IT read [and understood] this stuff, the world would be a better place, and The Daily WTF would have a lot less to post.)

Plus all the usual classic computer books that I'm sure people will mention in other posts.

Some favorites

[Scarblac]

Programming:

1. The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master: guide to being a professional software developer, covers a lot
2. Code Complete: how to craft a little bit of code; stuff like naming, indentation, etc. I read the 2nd edition which was great, the 3rd is reputed to be better.
3. Refactoring: giving a name to "improving existing code little by little", something we do every day; I found this a much more accessible first book to get into "High Church OO" than, say, Design Patterns.

Other:

1. Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: enthusiastic stories about scientific hubris
2. The Making of the Atomic Bomb: good history
3. The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems: got this as a birthday present, it's brilliant
4. Fiction by Neil Gaiman or Connie Willis
5. If you are into really far looking SF, fiction by Greg Egan
6. If you like unorthodox fantasy, fiction by China Mieville

Chess, why not:

1. The King, by Donner

WHY has no one mentioned

[RaNdOm OuTpUt]

The Zen of Programming?

What part of Inter-Library Loan do you not get?

[1_brown_mouse]

Libraries are very generous and sharing institutions.

Any fee they might charge (mine does not, but Uni did charge a nominal fee) is much cheaper than buying.

a minimalist programmer/mathematician's bookshelf

[tonigonenstein]

I found out you could get away with very few technical books, if you choose them well. Mine are: The C programming language The C++ programming language Effective C++ Design patterns Teubner Taschenbuch der Mathematik The art of computer programming Numerical recipes in C Cours de théorie des modèles Categories for the working mathematician

Among the best on my shelf are...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Lectures on Riemann Surfaces, RC Gunning (Best book I've read on Riemann surfaces.)
On Numbers and Games, J Conway (You know the strategy for Nim. This is that on acid.)
Enumerative Combinatorics I & II, Stanley (Everything you need to know about counting.)
Quantum Field Theory, Ryder (This is where I learned much of what I know.)
Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology, Bott & Tu (A masterpiece of clarity.)
Introduction to Algorithms, Cormen, Leiserson & Rivest (I thought I knew it all until I read this!)
The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, Goble (How many logics are there? More than you think.)
QED, Feynman (I'm lying, it's not on my shelf, I forgot who I lent it to. Eschew all QM books until you've read this.)
Categories for the Working Mathematician, MacLane. (I'm lying again. It's too expensive, but it should be on my shelf...)
Thinking Forth, Brodie. (Forth is the most beautiful programming language ever...after Haskell.)
A First Course in General Relativity, Schutz. (I swear I understood this stuff 20 years ago, but age takes its toll...)

Re:Among the best on my shelf are...

[kfg]

QED, Feynman (I'm lying, it's not on my shelf, I forgot who I lent it to. Eschew all QM books until you've read this.)

I might take slight exception to this. Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality is a good (I think the only good) popular book on Quantum Theory.

Although written for the layman there's no Woo Woo bullshit here.

KFG

Re:Among the best on my shelf are...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I looked through some pages using "search inside" on amazon and it looked down to earth and sensible. But what was cool about QED was that Feynman built a model, without using much mathematical notation, that made surprising non-trivial predictions, which turn out to be correct. Most pop science just gives you an account of the science with metaphors that are useless. Yes, they're a pretty picture you can ponder on and think to yourself "isn't physics amazing". But Feynman puts the tools in your hands to reason further. Only the very best pop science does that. (I don't know if Nick's book fits into that category.)

Re:Among the best on my shelf are...

[kfg]

Like I said, slight exception. I guess the root is that I consider QED the better book, but in the sense that it's in a slightly higher class, sort of a "semi-popular" format.

Herbert then Feynman would be a good one-two punch. Herbert to ground you and dispel any Woo Woo ideas about Quantum Theory you may have picked by cultural osmosis (and he's not a bad little writer either); and then Feynman to dig deeper.

. . .what was cool about QED was that Feynman built a model, without using much mathematical notation, that made surprising non-trivial predictions . . .

This is the way Feynman actually worked in his own head. A conceptual model came first, then the math to explain the model. That's the prime reason he also developed interesting and unique mathematical models and notations.

KFG

Re:Among the best on my shelf are...

[L'homme de Fromage]

Lectures on Riemann Surfaces, RC Gunning (Best book I've read on Riemann surfaces.)

I've always liked "Introduction to Riemann Surfaces" by George Springer. The explanations are clear and his approach seemed more intuitive to me than other books'.

Enumerative Combinatorics I & II, Stanley (Everything you need to know about counting.)

Agreed, these are fantastic books on the subject. Marshall Hall's "Combinatorial Theory" is another good book on the subject.

Quantum Field Theory, Ryder (This is where I learned much of what I know.)

Ryder definitely has its strong points, and I've always been torn between Ryder and Hatfield for deciding which is my favorite QFT book.

Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology, Bott & Tu (A masterpiece of clarity.)

100% agreed, this book is fantastic. I learned spectral sequences from this book.

Introduction to Algorithms, Cormen, Leiserson & Rivest (I thought I knew it all until I read this!)

CLR is definitely a good and comprehensive book, but I've always preferred the classic "The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms" by Aho, Hopcroft & Ullman, for its mathematical rigor.

QED, Feynman (I'm lying, it's not on my shelf, I forgot who I lent it to. Eschew all QM books until you've read this.)

I think Roland Omnes' "Understanding Quantum Mechanics" is a good book to read before getting too much into the formal aspects.

Categories for the Working Mathematician, MacLane. (I'm lying again. It's too expensive, but it should be on my shelf...)

Never got into that subject, beyond what I learned in Lang's "Algebra", which was more than enough for me. :)

Thinking Forth, Brodie. (Forth is the most beautiful programming language ever...after Haskell.)

I have Brodie's "Starting Forth" book. But I think Lisp is the most beautiful language ever. :)

A First Course in General Relativity, Schutz. (I swear I understood this stuff 20 years ago, but age takes its toll...)

I like this book (though the notation is kind of annoying), but eventually anyone studying GR will have to read "Gravitation" by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, which I think is a much more comprehensive book on GR. So I've always thought that MTW should be the GR book to read.

One book you didn't mention, but which I think every 'technical' person should own, is the classic "Principles of Mathematical Analysis" by Walter Rudin. People who know the book either love it or hate it. I'm in the "love it" camp. It's my favorite math book of all time.

Re:Among the best on my shelf are...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Uncanny reply - I didn't expect anyone to be familiar with quite so many books from my list, especially as they reflect my specific academic and work history!

I've always liked "Introduction to Riemann Surfaces" by George Springer.

I like the machinery in Gunning - sheaves, Cech cohomology and so on.

I learned spectral sequences from this book.

If there's one thing in my life I want to get good at it's spectral sequences. Bott & Tu are very explicit in pointing out exactly what all of the maps are, but there's still something I'm not quite getting.

Never got into that subject,

I was vaguely interested in Category Theory many years ago but I'm only now trying to get to get beyond basics because of the applications to Computer Science. Really beautiful stuff.

eventually anyone studying GR will have to read "Gravitation"

I blasted through Schutz when I was 18. MWT would have terrified me at that age! I did eventually buy MWT but I sold it just a few months ago. I realised that I'd learned as much GR as I was going to need in my life already and that MWT could go to someone who would really use it for a bargain price.

I think every 'technical' person should own..."Principles of Mathematical Analysis"

Funny you should mention that. I really don't get on well with analysis, but it is an esential subject. I kept thinking "I must buy Rudin" but then decided that I couldn't spend that much money on a subject I don't like. Eventually, a couple of months ago, I resolved the issue by buying a cheap analysis book published by Dover (Bachman & Narici) that seemed to cover the material I wanted. I have a mental block with analysis, I'm not sure what to do about it. What I really need is a book on a subject like axiomatic quantum theory that develops functional analysis from scratch using QM as a motivator.

Re:Among the best on my shelf are...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we're talking about theoretical physics......
Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory - M. Kaku
Strings, Conformal Fields, and M-Theory - M Kaku
String Theory, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 - J. Polchinski
Superstring Theory - Green, Schwarz, Witten

I just saw there is an updated version of Polchinski....looks like another trip to the e-bookstore!

Re:Among the best on my shelf are...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I couldn't get anywhere with Kaku's books. I used to own those but I found I couldn't follow the details of the reasoning. Green, Schwarz and Witten I still have. I really ought to get Polchinski, it sounds like the best book on the subject.

UPT from O'Reilly

[darkuncle]

the fact that your list didn't contain largely ORA titles was kind of surprising (my bookshelf is largely ORA with some other notable exceptions). By far the most-used (and most useful) book in my technical library is UNIX Power Tools. I could probably get by with that one volume alone and really not miss any of the rest of it. 800 pages of tips, tricks and hacks for the all-encompassing environment that is "UNIX" today, and nearly all of it is cross-platform and uses tools that would have worked equally well 15-20 years ago. Highly recommended.

Re:UPT from O'Reilly

[krelian]

Will someone please explain why Oreilly books are so heralded in the industry compared to say.. Wrox or Sams?

Re:UPT from O'Reilly

[Scarblac]

The main reason is that +- 10 years ago, O'Reilly's books were great and Wrox and Sams were unknown (did they exist?). Nowadays, O'Reilly's lineup has been diluted by a long list of mediocre titles, and there are a lot of other good publishers of tech books.

Entrepreneurial Books

[kninja]

Amen Brother.

A few more:

The Entrepreneurial Mindset (ISBN: 0875848346) (A bit theoretical, but gives some good qualitative measuring sticks)
The Beermat Entrepreneur (ISBN: 0273704540) (Available mainly in the UK, from what I can tell. Fantastic book about the phases of growing a company!)
The Art of the Start (ISBN: 1591840562) (I know the parent mentions Guy Kawasaki)
High Tech Startup (ISBN: 068487170X) (I second the recommendation of the parent)
The Intelligent Investor (ISBN: 0060555661) (A great book about investing - should help you avoid doing stupid things)

Helping make sense of the world

[GuyMannDude]

Since you list humorous books, I'm not sure what your definition of "technical" is. I'll assume you meant "non-fiction". Here's a few titles that are recommended for anyone who has a brain and wants to think hard about the state of the world.

• Books by Edward Tufte on how graphs, PowerPoint presentations, and other sources of technical information can mislead rather than inform (and how to correct this).
• _A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper_ or any other books by John Allen Paulos which focus on how a misunderstanding of mathematics has consequences for our society.
• The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.
• On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by West Point psychologist, military historian, and former Army Ranger Lt. Col. Grossman. Anyone who thinks that they would be able to "do what must be done" and kill anyone who threatened their family ought to read this. Also recommended reading for all the hawks out there that are so anxious to send our young out to fight unnecessary wars.

GMD

My library

[Anonymous Coward]

• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools. This book is no joke.
• Numerical Recipes in C has saved me a lot of time over the past few years.
• An Embedded Software Primer. When I had a bug up my ass about creating my own computer, this was a great help.
• I often refer to some second-hand math and english textbooks. They've been invaluable to me, but maybe I'm dumb.

Some advice

• I wasted a signifigant portion of my youth hacking. Don't bother. It's not interesting.
• O'Reilly books are basically collections of tips for helpless novices. If you really want to the learn the principles of something, avoid them like the plague.
• Overclocking your brain? Come on.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[kfg]

Yes, I'm dead serious. Think of it as the metatechnology handbook.

Looking at my deskside shelf and picking out those titles that others probably won't mention:
A Long Line of Cells; (or anything else by) Lewis Thomas: More metatechnology, from a biologist's standpoint.
How to Stay Alive in the Woods; Bradford Angier: Technology the way it used to be.
Boatbuilding; Howard Chapelle: Boatbuilding technology the way it used to be.
Bicycling Science; Whitt & Wilson: Technology when all you've got to make it go are your own muscles.
Racing and Sports Car Chassis Design; Costin & Phipps: The basics of space frames, race cars the way they used to be; and some still are. You could also view it as an introduction to triangulation.
Getting Started in Electronics; Forrest M. Mimms, III: Come oooooooooon, you know you want to be a hardware guy.
Prof. E. McSquared's Original, Fantastic & Highly Edifying Calculus Primer; Swann & Johnson: Just because.
Carroll Smith's Nuts, Bolts, Fasteners and Plumbing Handbook; Take a wild guess: The nuts and bolts of nuts and bolts (sorry, I couldn't resist).
The CRC Handbook: I was going to say that I don't know why nobody is going to mention this one, but I see someone has. I'm surprised. Ironically I would have surprised that no one did. There's just no pleasing some people.

KFG

Re:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[VAY]

I reccommend Zen and the Art... too - the best explanation of why people screw up DIY projects ever (amongst an awful lot of other stuff).

I've read it every couple of years since I was about 20 (I'm 37 now) and it changes with your own experience. My favorite book.

As a Librarian...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I urge you to check into whether or not your library accepts requests if you haven't already.

Also, many academic libraries are open to the public. I actually have a colleague that works in your local library system, If I can find her email address I'll bring this to her attention.

If not that, find out if your library offers interlibrary loan services or check out if there is anything available at open WorldCat. [worldcat.org] Perhaps someplace within reasonable driving distance will have it. (I realize this all assumes you will go to the same lengths I will to not spend a buck)

We (as a profession) really do try to get you everything you need free of charge. Unfortunately, we can't always get every item people want, but letting us know what you'd like helps.

Re:As a Librarian...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing to keep in mind is your local community college(if you have one). Getting a library card from them can get you access to the statewide university library system via ILL. I'll second the WorldCat service... which appears to have recently been opened up. I used to have to use a login provided by my library, but not now it seems.

Missing from the Security section

[Pheersome]

Schneier, Applied Cryptography. Everything you need to know about practical cryptographic primitives and cryptosystems is in the first 5-10 chapters of that book.

Re:Missing from the Security section

[clausen]

Schneier, Applied Cryptography. Everything you need to know about practical cryptographic primitives and cryptosystems is in the first 5-10 chapters of that book.

I disagree. Applied Crytography does not adequately describe the limitations of these primitives. All of the algorithms are insecure for most applications on their own. They need to be heavily modified to become secure.

For example, applying RSA directly to a plaintext does not protect against leaking partial information to an attacker (eg: whether the plaintext contains an even or odd number). Schneier doesn't mention this, nor how to fix this problem.

I recommend Wenbo Mao's "Modern Cryptography" instead, which spends chapters on getting these details right.

More suggestions

[Chemisor]

• The Black Book of Graphics Programming by Michael Abrash - THE book about optimization.
  
• On Intelligence - the ONLY book that explains how your brain works. No wishy-washy vitalist theories here!
  
• The Art of Electronics, Horowitz and Hill - every real nerd's hobby shelf should have one.
  
• Nanosystems by Drexler - to dream.
  
• A treatise on Electricity and Magnetism by Maxwell - an applied mathematician's brain at work. Most mathematicians don't care about the real world and just throw equations at you. In this book you'll find out how to actually make use of higher mathematics.
  
• Handbook of Chemistry and Physics - has every real-world measurement you can possibly imagine.
  
• Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham - this is considerably more fun to read than you think. Ever wanted to see a picture of a complex derivative?
  
• Ralf Brown's Interrupt List - to show you're cool.
  

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1

[Spazmania]

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1. If this isn't on your bookshelf you're not an Internet guru.

If you want to learn electronics/hardware...

[antispam_ben]

"The Art of Electronics" 2nd ed., 1989, ISBN 0521370957
Some of it, especially the stuff covering microprocessors, shows its age, but you won't find more practical info about electronics in one place than here. It requires some basic electronics knowledge (some DC and AC circuits, basic transistors), but from there it will take you a good ways.
One coauthor (Hill) posts to Usenet, and rumors of a third edition have been made (many analog parts mentions need updating as well), but if it happens it will be a few years down the road before it appears.

Other notable titles:
High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Howard Johnson 1993 ISBN 0133957241
Troubleshooting Analog Circuits Bob Pease ISBN 0750694998
(it seems at least as much design-related (and how to prevent trouble) as about troubleshooting)
Anything (analog-related) by Jim Williams

Re:If you want to learn electronics/hardware...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

The AoE and the Pease book are great suggestions. Another good one is a recent copy of the "ARRL handbook". Intended for radio hams, it is a good general electronics reference, particularly for analog/RF work.

Re:If you want to learn electronics/hardware...

[object88]

YES! A ./er after my own heart. The Art Of Electronics is on my nightstand on the moment, and Troubleshooting Analog Circuits is on the shelf.

Being a audio geek, I have a particular penchant for vacuum tubes, so I'll add:
RCA Receiving Tube Manual RC-27 There are PDF copies of various printings available on the internet.
Valve Amplifiers, 2nd Ed. (Morgan Jones) I wouldn't mind upgrading to the 3rd ed plus the complimentary Building Valve Amplifiers
The Ultimate Tone Vol. 1-3 (Kevin O'Connor)

Along those lines, anyone have a copy of The Stompbox Cookbook they'd be willing to part with?

I enjoyed reading several of the O'Reilly Linux books (Understanding The Linux Kernel, Linux Device Drivers, Building Embedded Linux Systems), but I can see them becoming of little value in a few years, as Linux itself ages and changes.

My favorite tech. books

[remembertomorrow]

The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes (ISBN: 0764544683)
Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel (ISBN: 0321294319)
Absolute OpenBSD: UNIX for the Practical Paranoid (ISBN: 1886411999)

o/

My Unix (geezer) shelf

[EQ]

Surprised nobody mentioned my (ancient) favorites -- then again, so few people left doing hardcore C/C++ systems coding. Seems to all be Java these days. Feh, tykes.

No links - no karma whoring.

The C Programing Language (K&R)
The C++ Programming Language -- Special 3rd Edition (Stroustrup)
Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library (Myers)
Exceptional C++: 47 Engineering Puzzles, Programming Problems, and Solutions (Herb Sutter)

The Scheme Programming Language (Dybvig) [we use Scheme as one of our scripting engines]
Lua 5.1 Reference Manual (Ierusalimschy, et al.) [This is our "less complex" scripting engine]

Python Cookbook (Martelli, et al.) [use this for prototyping and one-off lightweight apps - be sure to get the newest version]
Classic Shell Scripting (Robbins) [great for reminding you what you forgot since the last time you wrote a shell script]

Writing Effective Use Cases (Alistair Cockburn)
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gamma)

Unix Programming Environment (Kernighan & Pike)
Unix Network Programming, All Volumes (Stevens et al.)
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment (W. Richard Stevens)

Big pile of Oreilly flavor of the month books.

Of Course, Knuth even though I never use em much - more for the snob appeal I guess, or to throw at managers looking for technical explanations.

Oh and I almost forgot:

ANSI Common Lisp (Graham) - but (as you can see above) we use Scheme.

Dunno why I keep that Lisp book around except for the nerdity.

Re:My Unix (geezer) shelf

[EQ]

Damn. While I was looking at my shelf picking them out, about 2/3 of them were posted.

LOL!

free ones

[bcrowell]

Here is a list of what I consider to be the best free textbooks online. As it explains there, I've been wanting to put together a free CD of these (or at least an ISO image available via bittorrent) to promote the concept of free textbooks. Unfortunately the summer ended, and I've been busy teaching instead of following through on this project :-)

Mmm, technical...

[Colin Smith]

If we're talking technical, diagrams and the like...

Bunkai Jutsu, Ian Abernethy
Five Years One Kata, Bill Burgar

There's a bunch in the same vein but those two stand out as exceptional.

Advanced programming in the Unix environment, Stevens.

Again, there's a bunch of programming (in various languages), sysadmin manuals but that one gets to the heart of the matter.

Collins complete DIY manual, Jackson & Day

I wish I hadn't binned a couple of my old Maths and Stats books when I moved.

An ASCII Chart

[SurturZ]

I have an old extended ASCII table that I scanned in about a decade ago and reprint on a regular basis. Over the years I've added other stuff to it (hexadecimal conversion tables, colour tables etc).

It's getting a bit less useful in these Unicode days, but it is the longest lived technical document I still use.

3 books that really shaped my geekiness

[Andy_R]

Mathematical Models by H. M. Cundy, A. P. Rollett
A 55 year old textbook that has stood the test of time amazingly well. If you've ever wanted to make a paper model of a stellated icosadodecahedron, this book will tell you how, and if you haven't ever wanted to, then you soon will. The mix of slightly dry writing from english mathematics professors, high math and solid tips on the best way to manufacture glass nibs for a twin-elliptic harmonograph really captured my imagination as a child, and I was soon adapting my lego railway set to draw Lissajous's figures. Even now, some of the math is beyond me, but the fact that the book explains everything in terms of physical models and their manufacture makes the hard parts seem very much within reach. The final section on computing is perhaps only of historical interest, unless you fancy making an and gate the hard way, but it (like the rest of the book) undoubtedly has charm, an adjective that can rarely be applied to math textbooks!

The Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford
A celebration of post-war British engineering. Spufford takes 6 examples of British Boffinhood and narrates the events in a style that I found unputdownable. While you probably know how some of the events covered will turn out (Concorde doesn't get cancelled in the 1970s, and the two 1980s geeks do manage to finish writing "Elite" for the BBC micro) others, like the take of the British independent space programme might be more of a surprise.

Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh
More history of geekdom, this time a history of Fremat's Last Theorem. The math is presented in a form your mom would be able to follow, so this is one to read fro fun rather than enlightenment, but Singh really tells a tale well, and Andrew Wiles becomes the unlikely hero in a true story of mathematical genius, triumph, tials and tribulations (whatever a tribulation might be).

None anymore

[hairpinblue]

I don't know... after my last employer decided to be demonstrate the full might of,"We're the corporation, you're the employee, and you will get nothing you ask for and will take a burning poker up your butt whenever we feel like giving it to you" I've since lost my entire library--since I couldn't carry it with me as I was walking down the road after my savings exhausted itself after 4 months and I still couldn't find a new employer.

I did have most of 2002 vintage tldp.org printed out and filed quite nicely in black 3-ring binders.

Re:None anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing sorta happened to me. But I'm slowly rebuilding my collection. There is a ton of stuff on Peer-2-Peer (bittorent, irc, etc.) and you can also get good deals in the Amazon used books (sometimes they have "like new" books going for 1/4 to 1/2 the cover price).
A lot of IT books don't age very well anyway. I only really miss the classics like K&R, Richard Stevens stuff, and a handful of others. I had a bunch of other stuff more valuable to me that was never returned also. I guess the moral of the story is don't leave stuff you care about at work.
Well good luck to you!

Handbook of Artificial Intelligence

[Bastian]

The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Avron Barr & Edward Feigenbaum.

It comes in four volumes, each covering different topics. It's mostly introductory material, but it's served me as a great reference for algorithms. Probably out of print, but I got my copies used and it seems like it's easy enough to grab off of Amazon. Rather than chronological order, here's the order of usefulness:

I: Search, knowledge representation, computational linguistics.
IV: Blackboard systems, expert systems, distributed problem solving, computer vision, knowledge-based systems
III: Cognition models, deduction, computer vision, induction
II: languages for AI research, writeups of various example applications, automatic programming

Just in case..

[kunwon1]

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook
ISBN 0811825558

Here's an excerpt:
How to Wrestle Free from an Alligator: 4. If its jaws are closed on something you want to remove (for example, a limb), tap or punch it on the snout.

On DSP, and one recommended by Knuth in TAOCP

[antispam_ben]

Somewhere in "The Art of Computer Programming" Knuth recommends:

"How To Lie With Statistics", Darrel Huff, 1954.
This book goes no deeper into the math of statistics than average, mean and mode, but the examples of such things as selection biases and the (mis)use of graphs in advertising and propaganda make this a classic book, AND a hoot. It may fall more into the humor category than technical, but what it does cover, it covers correctly. As the author says in the intro, it's actually how to protect yourself from those who would use statistics to lie to you.

Back to deep technical know-how:
"Discrete-Time Signal Processing", 2nd. Ed., 1999, Oppenheim/Schafer/Buck
This is effectively the Third Edition of the venerable "Digital Signal Processing" by Oppenheim&Schafer

Well, ok, while I'm posting, here's a third book, another on DSP, with free online and not-free dead-tree versions available here:
http://dspguide.com/
It's a little more readable than "Discrete-Time..." and as a result you may actually get more out of it.

hardware

[fred133]

I sugeest a good hardware book like...
Printed Circuits Handbook by Clyde F. Coombs
ISBN 0-07-012608-9
Without books like this, we would all be reading this via snail mail.

My advice

[plopez]

Avoid anything with the word "dummies" in it. You are what you read.

I would reccomend reading "How to keep your volkswagen alive, a manual of step-by-step procedures for the compleat idiot". It is an accessible example of how to write a detailed set of procedures.
The author, John Muir, was an engineer before dropping out and opening up a garage. The section on 'Procedure for following procedures' is in my office, I think I am the only one that gets the joke (I am very lonely at work... and at home... and in general... I guess...).

But a good read for anyone who either wants to know how to write good documentation or just needs to keep their clunker running...

Variety Hour

[1937redskins]

Best books to understand how the things around you work: machinists bible meatls and how to weld them ac/dc fundimentals All old but good-- together they can give you an understanding of how energy interacts with matter...

"Mainly non-fiction"

[Malfourmed]

The Dilbert Principle takes pride of place in the management & business section of my personal library; more true-to-life, and certainly more readable, than the Porter, Senge, Schwartz and Peters tracts gathering dust next to it.

A few more

[Squidbait]

It's been mentioned, but if you do any C++, you absolutely must have exactly 2 books once once you've understood the basics:

The C++ Programming Language (Stroustrup)
Effective C++ (Meyers)

There are so many garbage books on C++ that rehash the same crap. These 2 are the rare ones that will actually help you progress further in your understanding.

In general, I try to find the one definitive book on a subject. There often is one. In CS, these would include:

Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen et al)
Compilers - Principles, Tools and Techniques (Ahi et al)
Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Sipser)

A good university text each on discrete math, linear algebra, databases, operating systems, and networking is handy too, but there seems not to be a consensus as to which is the best. I guess what I'm saying is "do a CS degree and keep all of your textbooks".

I remember growing up and teaching myself programming in high school, like many people here. If there is one thing I wish I'd had, it's better access to technical books. Good books are worth the money. They're better written, better organized, and have much more quality content than the web. Skip the mainstream book stores and proceed directly to your local university book store, wherein you will find many books you won't find anywhere else, and much less crap. Abandon public libraries as they contain little in the way of serious technical material. University libraries are much better and some will let you join for a minor annual fee (eg $50), even if you don't go to that school.

So much for that. Now, some random personal favorites:

The Selfish Gene (Dawkins)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett)
How the Mind Works (Pinker)
The Computational Beauty of Nature (Flake)
Practical Ethics (Singer)
Real Time Collision Detection (Ericson) - this book is much better than most I've seen on the subject

Physics

[Tim_UWA]

A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics Townsend (I forget the first name and it's not at home with me at the moment) It's kind of basic, good for a final year textbook, but it's quite digestible and saved my life back in the day...

Re:Physics

[masterzora]

Several days after anyone cares, but his name is John. Turns out he's a professor at my college....

very useful

[Goldsmith]

Building Scientific Apparatus
0-8133-4006-3

I agree

[kicks-ass]

Another Vote for the Art of Electronics By Horowitz and Hill (ISBN: 0521370957) Every geek of hardware should have one

Re:I agree

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

I've got the dutch version of the books. These are some of the best books I found on the subject. I've got a lowly degree in electronics I learned quite a few new things from these books. So that makes 3 votes. ;-)

Knuth and K&R are old, tired and lame

[acidrain]

The only worthwhile part of Knuth's work is the first book on sorting, and even then it is dry. Just because he can sling nasty formulas around when comparing algorithms doesn't mean a lot. These days we are using hardware that resemble DSPs and locality of reference problems can outweigh counting the number of multiplies by a long shot. Just learning O notation, what is an L2 cache miss and *to actually profile your code* instead of theorizing about it is much more important. His formulas aren't relevant on modern hardware.

The K&R's C Programming Language is only useful to people who already know C. And C is such a small language that you shouldn't need a reference book once you know it. However, if you are a language geek and like that kind of thing, get the actual C standard and read it. Seriously, it isn't that big. The C++ standard on the other hand, *that* is hard core.

Re:Knuth and K&R are old, tired and lame

[linguae]

The only worthwhile part of Knuth's work is the first book on sorting, and even then it is dry. Just because he can sling nasty formulas around when comparing algorithms doesn't mean a lot. These days we are using hardware that resemble DSPs and locality of reference problems can outweigh counting the number of multiplies by a long shot. Just learning O notation, what is an L2 cache miss and *to actually profile your code* instead of theorizing about it is much more important. His formulas aren't relevant on modern hardware.

The Art of Computer Programming is about algorithm analysis and development, not about computer architecture (caching) or software development (profiling). TAOCP, combined with Concrete Mathematics, the MIT algorithms book, and a good text on combinatorial algorithms should be more than enough to satisfy the needs of a computer scientist or seasoned software developer who needs all of the good algorithms that he or she can get. TAOCP isn't a book about all of computer science, but it isn't trying to be one either.

The K&R's C Programming Language is only useful to people who already know C. And C is such a small language that you shouldn't need a reference book once you know it. However, if you are a language geek and like that kind of thing, get the actual C standard and read it. Seriously, it isn't that big.

K&R is a useful book for C reference; in fact, I consider it as an explanation to the C standard. I refer to K&R, not necessarily the standard, for reference whenever I am stuck on a certain C concept. (Compiler construction is different; you should follow the standard to the letter). There is a reason why the K&R book hasn't been updated since 1989; other than C99 extensions, the book is a very good explanation of C as is. I learned C largely from this book (although, to be fair, I used an O'Reilly book to learn the basics of C before taking a class that used C. The professor in that class didn't assign a book, so I sought out the best book according to ratings: K&R. My book is worn out out of 2 years of use, but I love it).

Re:Knuth and K&R are old, tired and lame

[acidrain]

satisfy the needs of a computer scientist or seasoned software developer who needs all of the good algorithms that he or she can get. I'm assuming you don't write mainstream commercial software. And in that case you should be doing better research, not archaeology. There is a reason why the K&R book hasn't been updated since 1989 The reason they don't update it is because then it wouldn't be the overpriced sacred fossil that it is. Seriously, I have tried loaning my copy to people who were learning C and it never went well. People learn much better when there are detailed explanations with examples. My book is worn out out of 2 years of use, but I love it). I highlight the symbol and press F1. But I like using computers, I'm funny that way.

Re:Knuth and K&R are old, tired and lame

[RoloDMonkey]

Haven't we had this conversation before? To sum up: Knuth, Sedgewick, van der Linden, Kernighan and Ritchie. For more details, click on the link above.

Books of Lasting Value

[the eric conspiracy]

I would suggest going light on books that focus on the tech du jour, APIs that are under rapid development etc. and invest in stuff that has lasting value.

Core Java: no
K&R: yes

C#: No
EJB: No
XML: No

Applied Cryptography: yes
Introduction to Algorithms: yes

Python Cookbook: No
Perl Cookbook: No

Of course if you are working in a particular area, then it migh be worthwhile to pick up something - used books from Amazon Marketplace or Safari are good for this sort of thing.

If you want to get a feel for a book you can always hed over to the Barnes and Noble and do some browsing.

Mod parent up

[JoeCommodore]

Great book!

The best non-porn sex book ever written

[imperious_rex]

Certainly not a technical book, but definitely non-fiction, The Guide to Getting It On! is probably the best sex manual I have ever read (yes, read, which means I didn't just look at it for the illustrations!). Unlike most matter-of-fact sex books which usually try to distract the reader from the dry prose with slick illustrations, this book approaches its subject with a style that's very light-hearted and fun (but it does cover the more serious topics, such as STDs and other bad stuff, so the authors aren't oblivious to the risks). The black & white inked illustrations are well done, reminding me of the kind of art that graced most RPG manuals before they went to color. I highly recommend it (to those over 18, of course).

Alton Brown

[swelande]

Gear For Your Kitchen not only tells you what to stock in your kitchen, but why. His other books are pretty fun too.

The art of Electronics

[gus goose]

Horowitz and Hill

2nd Edition.

Can't go wrong with that.

gus

A classic

[BigFootApe]

Stevens, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Essential reference tools

[Macgrrl]

The Australian Oxford Dictionary
ISBN: 0195517962

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
William Strunk Jr., E. B. White, Roger Angell (Foreword)
ISBN: 020530902X

Most of my business communications are written - making these tools essential.

Some life changing ones

[Mathness]

I bet none of you are going to mention some of the most important ones.

"How to build the perfect masturbatorium"
"wget - You and pr0n harvesting on the internet"
"Awk - Advanced wanking knowledge"

Mastering Regular Expressions

[celest]

I've found that after reading this book there are so many insights to be gained and so many applications for Regexes that it's worth the read even if you don't program in PERL or other Regex rich language.

I've had dreams in Regexes after reading this book. You see the world as patterns everywhere, just waiting to be m/atched/.

Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, By Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, ISBN: 0-596-52812-4

math and optics...

[ctalnh]

Handbook of Mathematical Functions, by Abramowitz and Stegun. Lots of pointless function tables that can be replaced by a good desk calculator, but it does have more formulas than you can shake a stick at, esp. for special functions. Cheap, too, since it's a Dover book.

Video Microscopy, by Inoue' and Spring. Great ref for microscopy and imaging.

My favourite technical books

[clausen]

Hi,

Here's my list, in no particular order:

MATH:
  * Dudley, "Real Analysis and Probability"
  * Stewart and Tall, "Complex Analysis"
  * Artin, "Algebra"
  * Milnor, "Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint"
  * Spivak, "Calculus on Manifolds"
  * Cook, Cunningham, Pulleyblank and Schrijver, "Combinatorial Optimization"

STATISTICS:
  * Casella and Berger, "Statistical Inference"
  * Shaffer, "The Art of Causal Conjecture"
  * Greene, "Econometric Analysis"
  * Rao, "Linear Statistical Inference and its Applications"

COMPUTER SCIENCE:
  * Aho, Sethi and Ullman, "Compilers: Principles and Tools"
  * Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein, "Introduction to Algorithms"
  * Mao, "Modern Cryptography"
  * Bell, Moffat and Witten, "Managing Gigabytes"
  * Goldreich, "Foundations of Cryptography", volumes I and II.
  * Okasaki, "Purely Functional Data Structures"
  * Sipser, "Introduction to the Theory of Computation"
  * Pierce, "Types and Programming Languages"
  * Gray and Reuter, "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques"

ECONOMICS
  * Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, "Microeconomic Theory"
  * Fudenberg and Tirole, "Game Theory"
  * Muthoo, "Bargaining Theory"
  * Laffont and Martimort, "The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model"
  * Cooley, "Frontiers of Business Cycle Research"
  * Alt and Shepsle, "Perspectives on Positive Political Economy"
  * Stokey and Lucas, "Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics"
  * Tirole, "The Theory of Industrial Organization"
  * Dixit, "Lawlessness and Economics"

This book seems to fit into all of the above categories!
  * Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi, "Reasoning About Knowledge"

Cheers,
Andrew

Re:My favourite technical books

[clausen]

I forgot to mention:

  * McKusick, Bostic, Karels, Quarterman, "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System"

no way

[sohp]

There's really a book titled, "1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k"?

IM IN UR COMMENTZ, STEALIN UR KARMAZ

Photo of my technical bookshelf

[Will Sargent]

I've been accumulating books for years. I think the best ones are the down to earth programming ones -- Code Complete, The Practice of Programming, Programming Pearls, and the like.

I have a photo on Flickr that I like to look at when I feel stupid.

There are a few more books at work, but most of these have served me well at various times. Apart from the BEEP protocol book, that was a total waste.

Re:Photo of my technical bookshelf

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

nice collection. Unfortunatly I can't read the titles. :-/

Re:Photo of my technical bookshelf

[Will Sargent]

You can change the size of the photo. At the original size (5 megapixel camera thingy) it's very readable.

sysadmin & wireless

[theobscurest]

Regarding my primary interests of unix system administration and wireless technologies, here are just a few books I have found to be incredibly useful and/or interesting:

• Essential System Administration, Third Edition (Frisch)
• Unix in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition (Robbins)
• The Practice of System and Network Administration (Limoncelli, Hogan)
• Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks (Unger)
• Wireless Hacks, Second Edition (Flickenger & Weeks)

Of course, anything published by O'Reilly and fitting with your given interests is worth having as well.

Books

[Doctor Faustus]

Computer stuff:
Whichever of Bruce Eckel's "Thinking In..." books is appropriate for what you want to learn.
Bruce McKinney's Hardcore Visual Basic is a very good book. Unfortunately, it's about Visual Basic.
PostScript Language Reference
O'Reilly's XSLT book
The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Tannenbaum's networking book
The hopelessly outdated "Peter Norton's Guide to the IBM PC" is still interesting.

Pic here

[Project2501a]

Why list them, when I can show you?

I only need one book

[Anonymous Coward]

ISBN 0131103628.

Assembly Language Step By Step

[REBloomfield]

http://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Step-step- Programming/dp/0471375233

This is the only book on Assembly you need, and it covers linux at the back.

Bricks and mortar

[Phreakiture]

Step outside. Go to your an IRL book store (I don't care what chain, or any chain, suits your fancy) and browse. Most book stores will let you sit and read for a little bit. When you find what you like, buy it.

That solves the sampling problem.

Re:Bricks and mortar

[Phreakiture]

Sorry to reply to my own post, but here's an even better idea: Once you find what you like, buy two (if it is within your means) and donate one to the library.

Every good sysadmin

[mattboston]

should have at least a couple of the O'Reilly Perl books.

"Tech Support Yellow Pages"...

[Anonymous Coward]

from Cybermedia.
An alphabetical listing of tech company address, main, sales, support and Fax phone numbers, web sites, e-mail address, NNTP servers and all sorts of other contact information.

Leadership

[DG]

Amazingly, I've got all those books on my shelf. Good list.

Allow me to add to your list:

"On Combat" by Col Grossman. Where "On Killing" is analysis, "On Combat" is tactics - how to deal with the physiological and psychological consequences of being called upon to deal deadly force. A must read for any soldier, cop, EMT tech, but a good read for everybody else. Col Grossman also has an audio presentation of the stuff in this book, it is fascinating stuff.

"The Face of Battle" and "The Mask of Command" by John Keegan. Analysis of leadership and command in a military setting. Keegan is very readable and has tons of insights - and his other works, mostly histories, are also excellent. An oeuvre well worth perusing.

"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card and "Starship Troopers" by Heinlein - probably the best books on the practical application of personal leadership skills and the development of same ever written. Seriously. Grok these books and you learn how to lead men.

DG

Other ideas

[scottsk]

Not sure if this is just about computer science, or interesting books in general.

Feynman - six easy and not so easy pieces (how science works) - character of physical law (how to think like science). He explains the scientific process, and is a good teacher. He was also a hardware hacker of a sort (safes and stuff).

Programming Perl - even if you don't, it's a thinking paradigm shift and introduction to a new culture.

The design & evolution of C++ - if you know C++, this account is fascinating. If you don't, read The C++ Programming Language.

DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS - by Aho and Ullman of the Dragon Book and Hopcroft - overlooked computer science book by the A in AWK and two authors of the Dragon book!

Any other book in the Jargon file, like the Wizard Book. Usually books like that have a reason for sticking around so long.

Ballistics Books

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Ballistics is an interesting field for the hobbyist, but I can't say I agree with your choice of book.

For the advanced hobbyist, Modern Exterior Ballistics by McCoy (ISBN 0764307207) is the choice. However, the math is tougher than most people want to deal with and there are errors in the text. Consider it a "going from intermediate to advanced" book. McCoy, now deceased, is never going to correct the errors in the book and I doubt anyone else would want to bother, so you need to be knowledgeable enough at the start to catch the errors and not be bothered.

Applicable to a broader audience is Understanding Firearms Ballistics by Rinker (ISBN 0964559854). For most knowledgeable shooters, this book is the stepping stone from "the guy at the gun club who knows what he's doing" to being a real expert. The few paragraphs on wind drift as a function of rate of velocity loss (not time of flight, as most people assume) in the transonic range were worth the cost of the book to me. (Just yesterday, I received my subscription copy of a reloading magazine with a column by gun writer Bryan Pearce in which he makes some point by comparing the .38 Special to the .357 Maximum and gives partial credit to the higher velocity of the Maximum for producing less wind drift. That's all wrong; if both cartridges launch the same full-weight bullet at near-max velocity, the Maximum will exhibit *more* wind drift specifically because it is launching the bullet at higher velocity. Even gun pros get this stuff wrong.) The book is far from perfect, though. It needs a good editor and the charts are poorly hand-drawn. Despite that, it can take a good shooter, even one who is weak on the math, and give him a very good working knowledge of exterior ballistics. That's saying something.

Along the same line, Handloading for Competition by Zediker (ISBN 096269259X) is, by far, the best handloading book on the market, assuming you already have a basic manual from one of the major bullet manufacturers. It goes past the basics wonderfully. Benchresters and rimfire users are in another world, but any other competitive shooters will find it incredibly useful. I only have two complaints. First, the binding is cheap. On my copy, the cover delaminated and pages started falling out within a couple of months of constant use. Second, the author frequently butchers the English language in a failed attempt to entertain with a fake "down-home, country" writing style. Seriously, he uses stupid metaphors like discussing a squirrel running headlong into a tree while attempting to make a point about the relative quality of reloading presses. You'll occasionally find yourself re-reading the same paragraph five times trying to figure out just wtf he's trying to say. That's forgiveable, though, since most of the book is both accessible and advanced like no other reference on the subject.

On Brains and Statistics

[airship]

On Brains:

"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" offera a look at some of the fascinating ways in which our wetware controller can go wrong. Or read any other book by Oliver Sachs. He knows his stuff, and he's a very entertaining writer.

On Statistics:

"How to Lie With Statistics" is a venerable book that is still in print 60 years after it was written. It's slim, funny, and clearly communicates the many ways in which deceptive entities (like corporations, media, and government) lie to you using statistics. HTLWS will sharpen your skepticism to a dagger point. This book should be required reading for everyone.

You should also try searching for interesting keywords at Librarything.com. Gazillions of geeks have their libraries online there, and you'll see what they're reading and recommending. (My own library is half-cataloged there so far.)

Moo

[Chacham]

TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1.

Geek books

[CPPgeek]

I suppose that I'm way too geekish, but these are my favorite reference books that I use almost daily.

The C++ Standard Library by Josuttis [ISBN 0-201-37926-0]
Windows Internals by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon [ISBN 0735619174]
Windows Server 2003 Bible, R2 and SP1 Edition by Shapiro and Boyce [ISBN 0471754803]

I also love my K&R textbook. I agree that a lot of it is dated, but they are truly legends and no library of technical books is without them (IMHO).

My Library for Software Engineering

[psalm33]

Stuff I have gathered to help in my profession, software engineering including C++ coding, as well as integration type activities including many types of scripting, over the last 15 years of my career:

• The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup - If you want a language reference, go straight to the source!
• STL Tutorial and Reference Guide, Second Edition by Musser, Derge, and Saini - For get-your-hands-dirty C++ work
• Effective STL by Scott Meyers
• Unix Power Tools by Powers, Peek, O'Reilly & Loukides - Great reference for Unix tools, Unix command line, shell scripting.
• Perl in a Nutshell by Patwardhan, Siever & Spainhour - Good Perl reference, including CGI stuff.
• Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk by Ken Jones, Jeffrey Hobbs, Brent B. Welch - Great Tcl reference or for learning Tcl (a good language for prototyping GUIs, writing quick GUI tools, or tying other tools together).
• The O'Reilly & Associates Definitive Guides to the X Window System - Getting out-of-date by today's standards, but a great references to an early "Object Oriented" style GUI system.
• OSF/Motif Style Guide from the Open Software Foundation - also out-of-date, but still has great relevant lessons on keeping your UI design consistent, usable, and standardized.

And of course, I reccomend for any Software Engineer, some good references for your particular domain in which you work, so you know how to apply the domain knowledge to your software application. For me that would be, e.g.:

• The Railroad, What It Is, What It Does by Armstrong - Great overview of the railroad industry, where I am currently employed
  

Ideas and musings...

[cr0sh]

I can't begin to list the number of books on all manner of subjects that my wife and I have in our library. Let it suffice to say that we own well north of 1000 volumes, and it is an eclectic mixture of fiction and fact. I can, however, reccommend a few general things that may interest you, as well as upon the proper way to build up a good library:

Let me first start off with library building. Purchasing books new is sometimes necessary - new books are released every day, and sometimes you just have to have that latest volume for your collection. However, purchasing new books, as I am sure you know, can be a very expensive task, depending on the title and type of book. For this reason, make sure that the new books you purchase are worth the money. Also, have a feeling for what the general public buys: that new book may hit the bargin shelf in a month faster than you may think is possible (I have one book I love for the imagery, entitled "100 Suns", a large, pictorial photo-essay book on the development of nuclear weapons from the vantage point of DOD photographers - it originally sold for $80.00+ over Christmas, but after the holidays it dropped to the bargain rack for $25.00 - in this case, the general public won't buy books on nuclear weapons over the holidays - fancy that!). Many books of a scientific or technical nature fall into this kind of status. So, check the bargain rack carefully. Also, the bargain rack is a great place to obtain nicely bound classics, which make any library look great when faced on the shelf properly (and the stories are excellent, as well).

However, the best book values are to be found online and in used book stores. Check in your area as well for used book sales which benefit your library system. Here in Phoenix, Arizona, we have an organization called the "Friends of the Phoenix Library", which runs annual book sales to benefit the local library system. Most books sale for $1.00 or less. There are also video tapes, dvds, and cds for sale as well. Foreign language books, complete encyclopedia sets and magazines can be had as well. There is also a book sale that runs every year called the "VNSA Book Sale" (Visiting Nurses or something like that). Then there are the myriad numbers of used book stores and antique stores you can scrounge in. Online, places like Abe Books and others, as well as eBay, can help you find that one book you need to complete your collection. I should note that you should try to always buy good condition, first-edition hardbound printings if you can. While they take up more space, they will last longer, and conceivably may appreciate more in the future (depending on volume and rarity over time, of course). They also look nicer than a bunch of paperbacks. However, note that there are many old and good paperbacks out there that would look great on a shelf, and/or provide great information - so don't shun them entirely.

As far as books that may interest you, I strongly suggest you should have a complete set (hard to find, though) of the Popular Mechanics Do-It-Yourself encyclopedias from the late 1950's, early 1960's. It is an excellent idea and knowledge resource on a wide variety of topics, from car maintenance to home repair. If you own a home, you owe yourself to have a copy of it. Another great set of books is Kurt Saxon's "The Survivor" compilation. I must caution that througout these books (there are four volumes), Mr. Saxon intersperses his own little gems of essays. At first, these essays seem like the ramblings of a former old KKK member, but if you persevere and read carefully, you soon find out that Mr. Saxon hates anybody who is lazy and frivolous with their money, regardless of who they are otherwise - when you realize that (or just ignore the essays), you will come to see these volumes to be the tomes of collected wisdom they are (I can't even begin to ennumerate everything that is in these books). If you have an interest in "DIY" the old-school way (ie - Want to learn how to turn the rear diff of a Model-T into a water pumping windmil

Wow. Tough ones

[Anonymous Coward]

Those books are pretty hard. Does anyone have the Cliff's Notes for Camus? -- George

My books

[Anonymous Coward]

- Compilers : Principles, Techniques, and Tools
- The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3

- Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns
- Code Complete
- Design Patterns
- Refactoring : Improving the Design of Existing Code
- Extreme Programming Installed

- GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers
- The Humane Interface

- Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice
- Curves and Surfaces for Computer-Aided Geometric Design
- Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques

- UNIX Network Programming, Volume 1: Networking APIs - Sockets and XTI
- Practical File System Design with the Be File System
- Planning for PKI: Best Practices Guide for Deploying Public Key Infrastructure

- The Unified Modeling Language User Guide
- Unified Software Development Process

- Enterprise JavaBeans (3rd Edition)
- Building Web Applications with UML

UNIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technical books? That phrase has a fair amount of play. One of your categories is 'computers etc.', so how about some UNIX books (this is /. after all).

- Design of the UNIX Operating System, Maurice J. Bach
- Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System, Keith Bostic & Marshall Kirk Somebody
- Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, W. Richard Stevens
- UNIX Network Programming, 2 Vols, ibid
- TCP/IP Illustrated, 3 Vols, ibid

The Stevens books contain some of the best technical writing I've seen. Might be an idea to look for older editions, newer ones (I own 3rd Ed of UNPv1) have been updated by other authors since Stevens' passing, and IMHO aren't as well written (thought maybe just as valuable in terms of information.)

You're thinking inside the box...

[DoChEx]

Learn the principles within the books:

The Selfish Gene
Once you get the ideas in this book then you can make code some really interesting programs, if you're willing to use your imagination.

The Extended Phenotype
Another book that has some cool ideas about how other object's properties can affect us. Like certain combinations of flashing lights can cause seizures in some people, the light through their eyes gets into their brain causing it to malfunction. 'Snow Crash' is based off some of the ideas in here. SC is a great book also.

The Selfish Meme
How ideas work. Again this is building on the ideas in the last two books

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell, we're not worthy! By no means a perfect history of western philosophy and some ideas are not given fair and unprejudiced threatened. But there is a wealth of ideas contained in a single place. It's a good place to start and then read more on individual topics of interest... like Schopenhauer

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Lets stop all the crazy wars. A look at Man's inhumanity to man, done in the name God. A great gift idea for all those you love that are religious.