Bill de hÓra: Two classic hardbacks
Bill's weblog is a constant steam of excellent coment. His recent review of the year of his own blog highlighted this exellent commentary on Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs
For every programmer that adores this book, there's probably five who don't and ten who've never come across it, and if they did, would think it irrelevant to their working lives. I can sympathize with those fifteen programmers having been one of them. All the code in the book is in Scheme. That's a barrier right there because it means most people will have to learn a non-algol language to understand the book. But given the range and depth this book succeeds in covering, it's definitely the case that Scheme is a good choice. Given the first edtion was published in 1985 (I think), it's hard to imagine it being done in any other language. Smalltalk was another powerful language available at the time, but then again, Objects don't appear for 200 pages (in section three).