What is the single most influential book every pro

Question

If you could go back in time and tell yourself to read a specific book at the beginning of your career as a developer, which book would it be?

I expect this list to be varied and to cover a wide range of things.

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Answer 1

Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. Get it used cheap. But you might not get the humor until you've worked on a few failed projects.

The beauty of the book is the copyright year.

Probably the most profound takeaway "law" presented in the book:

The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem (F.F.T.): Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.

The idea being that there are failing parts in any given piece of software that are masked by failures in other parts or by validations in other parts. See a real-world example at the Therac-25 radiation machine, whose software flaws were masked by hardware failsafes. When the hardware failsafes were removed, the software race condition that had gone undetected all those years resulted in the machine killing 3 people.

Answer 2

One of my personal favorites is Hacker's Delight, because it was as much fun to read as it was educational.

I hope the second edition will be released soon!

Answer 3

hackers, by Steven Levy.

The personality and way of life must come first. Everything else can be learned.

Answer 4

@Peter Coulton -- you don't read Knuth, you study it.

For me, and my work... Purely Functional Data Structures is great for thinking and developing with functional languages in mind.

Answer 5

The New Turing Omnibus http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HlYd-%2BRwL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Really good book. Has a high-level taste of the most important areas of computer science. Yes, CS != programming, but this is still useful to every programmer.

Answer 6

Discrete Mathematics For Computer Scientists http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HCJ5R42KL._SL500_BO2,204,203,200_AA219_PIsitb-sticker-dp-arrow,TopRight,-24,-23_SH20_OU02_.jpg

Discrete Mathematics For Computer Scientists by J.K. Truss.

While this doesn't teach you programming, it teaches you fundamental mathematics that every programmer should know. You may remember this stuff from university, but really, doing predicate logic will improve you programming skills, you need to learn Set Theory if you want to program using collections.

There really is a lot of interesting information in here that can get you thinking about problems in different ways. It's handy to have, just to pick up once in a while to learn something new.