• Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
• Cormen et.al, Introduction to Algorithms
• UNIX in a Nutshell
• Hennessy & Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
• Bently, Programming Pearls
• Beatty & Chaiken, The New Solar System
• Larson & Wertz, Spacecraft Mission Analysis and Design
• Milton & Arnold, Introduction to Probabilty and Statistics: Principles and Applications for Engineerng and the Computing Sciences
  

I reserve the right to add the remaining two to my list at a later date

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Originally posted by platypus:
fiction or nonfiction?

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Flatland - Edwin Abbott

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Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaing fixed in their places, move freely about on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like the shadows -- only hard and with luminous edges -- and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.

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Dungeon Masters Guide - Gary Gygax and others now.

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You will find a lot of information in this book, but you will not find pat answers to all your questions and easy soutions for all your game problems.

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Stuff- Ivan Amato (darn amazon says out of print)

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Four high-qaulity Wedgewood cups can support a tank. But woe to those who put a great deal of tension on pottery vessels or teacups: Such tension entails a force that pulls on the chemical stitching holding the grains together.

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The Binary Bible - Saint $ilicon (Amazon does not even know about it)

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The Giver Of Data gave Oddam just one System Command regarding this tree structure:"You may freely eat of every tree on the Griden. But of the the tree of Knowledge of Independent Processing Power you may not eat, for on that day you eat of it you will be overwhelmed by Data.

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Anything by Freeman Dyson but I have from Eros to Gaia at my fingertips

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We can't calculate from general principles the optimal size of a scientific project, any more than we can calculate from general principles the optimal size of an elephant or a whale.

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The Golden Gate - Vikram Seth

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He tuned his thoughts to elctronic
Circuitry. This soothed his mind.
He left irregular (moronic)
Sentimentality behind.
He thought of or-gates and of and-gates
Of ROMs. of nor-gates, and of nand-gates,
Of nanoseconds, Megabytes,
and bits and nibbles... but as flights
Of silhouetted birds move cawing
Across the pine-serrated sky,
Dragged from his cove, not knowing why.
He fells an urgent riptide drawing
him far out, where, caught in the kelp
Of loneliness, he cries for help.

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Einstein for Beginners - Schwartz&McGuiness

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Damn ! There goes my image again. I keep telling them not to go 186,000 miles per second when I'm shaving.

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Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

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Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies -- in certain very special ways -- this leads to true intelligence.

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Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing - Philip Greenspun

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There can be more to life than making a client's bad ideas flesh with photoshop and Perl/CGI.

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microserfs - Douglas Coupland

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I am [email protected], If my life was a game of Jeopardy ! my seven dream categories would be: Tandy products, Trash TV of the late 70's and early 80's, The history of Apple, Career anxieties, Tabloids, plant life of the pacific Northwest , Jell-O 1-2-3.

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

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It seems natural and normal to me to make use of the small tool kits and instruction booklets supplied with each machine.

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The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

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Well, This seemed like a fun toy, so I dug into the accounting program.

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I am tired of typing now....

1) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy collected works by Douglas Adams

2) Signed first printing of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

3) Designing with JavaScript (the name of the author unfortunately escapes me -- great right-brained approach to JavaScript)

4) The Photoshop WOW Book

5) Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections

6) M.C. Escher Pop-up book (compliments the coffee table litho book nicely)

7) Star Wars Chronicls (ultimate Star Wars coffee table book, given as a graduation gift)

8) Cyberia (extended essay on cyberculture by Douglas Rushkoff)

9) Microserfs (trite I know, but...)

10) House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

They also include a lot of Rutherford's practical jokes, including the winding up of a downstairs neighbour by making her pet tortoise grow to giant size over the space of a couple of weeks.

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Originally posted by Swiss Mercenary:
Anything by William Gibson

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UGH! CAN'T STAND HIM! For many geeky reasons, that I won't go into.

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Originally posted by Swiss Mercenary:

Anything related to Dungeons and Dragons

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maybe it's because I'm a lit major, but I doubt it, since I really like Peter David's fiction and I like comics, but ever D&D novel besides the original Dragonlance trilogy that I've ever read has be utter crap. Even if you're talking about rule books, there are some that are good, some that are bad. See my articles on The Time Waster's Guide

Geeky books that I do like? GURPs expansion books. Well researched. Douglas Adams (I almost like the Dirk Gently books better than HHGTTG), LotR, [U]Understanding Comics[/U] by Scott McCloud, [U]Kingdom Come[/U] by Alex Ross, Mark Waid, et al., and Goethe's Faust

I didn't care for Ender's Game for realism problems (been editing too long), even though it was an enjoyable read. I guess I'm more of a wordsmith geek.

'Illuminatus Trilogy', glad to run into others that appreciate it

I am not going to berate you for your comments, after you have your reasons, I may not agree with them, but you have the right to have them.

I can agree that not all Dungeons & Dragons books are great, here I was talking about the reference and rule books.

If you want good D&D novels to read, read the Dark Elf stories by Salvatore, I find them excellent and Salvatore is a good author, his Crimson Shadow books are really enjoyable.

Swiss: 'Illuminatus' is also great. I'ld guess you are also a Pynchon and 'X-Files' fan if you like conspiracy stories.

I'm not big on top 10 lists, but I think one of the most important programming books of all time is "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger. It's a must read for anyone trying to move from programming novice to expert.
<begin old fart anecdote>In 1978 or '79 I was looking for a summer job. I sent an unsolicited resume to Whitesmiths, which was Peter Plauger's company at the time. On the day of my interview the advance copies of the Japanese translation of 'Software Tools' arrived in the office. He was beaming like a proud father while we thumbed through it. In the middle of one page there was a single English word "robustness", which they could not translate suitably. We all thought it was incredibly funny that one of the central themes of the book was something that they couldn't find the right word for.
<end old fart anecdote>

_The Mathematical Magpie_, edited by Clifton Fadiman. This is the first explicitly geeky book I ever read. It's a compendium of math-related stories, cartoons, poems, and anecdotes.

_Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps_, Kees Boeke. I got really lucky with this. I had $5 to spend in a bookstore, and I happened to pick this out. _Cosmic View_ contains a series of pictures taken at length scales from 10e-13 meters to 10e+27 meters (more or less, figures from memory), with a description of what objects would be in scale in each picture.

_A Wrinkle In Time_, Madeleine L'Engle. The whole Calvin family are such geeks, and they are not even self-conscious geeks. They just geek out, support each other, save each other's lives and sanity.

_I, Robot_, Isaac Asimov. Geeky robot scientists and their creations explore the solar system and beyond. Asimov washed the Frankenstein complex right out of science fiction. This book made me want to be a computer programmer.

_The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, Robert Heinlein. This book has everything: computers, sex, politics, frontier living, moon rockets, love, marriage, death.

_The C Programming Language_, Kernighan and Ritchie. Like the language itself, this book is not only better than its predecessors, it's better than its successors.

_Calculus_, Michael Spivak. My favorite math book ever. This is a hard core honors book with all the good parts about the continuity properties of real numbers.

_Molecular Quantum Mechanics_, Atkins. There's a lot of quantum books, but this one is my personal favorite. The piece de resistance is halfway through the book, Ehrenfest's theorem, which is a *proof* of Newton's third law F=ma from a more fundamental physical law, Schroedinger's equation. Atkins just walked through the math without telegraphing what it was proving, and laid the "this simplifies to F=ma" line on me at the end. I was enlightened.

_Cheaper by the Dozen_, Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. This is not a book about a man and a woman and their 12 kids. It's a book about a geeky man and a geeky woman and their 12 geeky kids. This family would have fit right in to the milieu of Robert Heinlein's early 20th century America in "Time Enough for Love" and "To Sail Beyond the Sunset". That's because Heinlein cribbed from the Gilbreths! He acknowledges the inspiration in one of the sayings from the Notebooks of Lazurus Long.

Also an excellent movie. The sequel "Belles on Their Toes" was funny also, but the movie treatment, at least, was too Hollywoodish (I haven't read the book).

Heinlein cribbed from the Gilbreths!

<Johnny Carson>
I did not know that.
</Johnny Carson>

The Art of Electronics - Paul Horowitz

National Geographic Photography Field Guide: Secrets to Making Great Pictures - Peter Burian

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Originally posted by Rednivek:
The Art of Electronics - Paul Horowitz

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Originally posted by Evilbunny:
One number...

42!

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Um, Alex what is... "Life the Universe and Everything?"

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It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes

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- "Timeline" by Michael Crichton
- "The Lord of the Rings" by Tolkien
- "The Catcher In The Rye" by J D Salinger
- "Captain Nemo's Library" by Per Olov Enquist (not sure about the title, the book's in swedish)
- "Dracula" by Bram Stoker
(it's more fun when one thinks of the scientific discoverys made just one year after it was published)
- Most of Jules Verne's books, I spent all last summer reading them.
- And, ofcourse, my VB6 bible.