I just finished reading the Pragmatic Programmer for the first time and felt that it was pretty much a letdown. For one, it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence (even though I think it's mostly right, and that empirical evidence for some of their claims exists). Two, I feel like an undergraduate software course covers 75% of the material in the book (at least mine did). Maybe people have learned since it was first published, or maybe I've just worked on pretty good teams that practiced the stuff, but nothing in there was ground breaking or made me a better developer. Three, there was a lot of filler in the book, summaries, talking about future, and past chapters, etc that added no value except to inflate the page count. I feel like Pragmatic Programmer would be a good book to read before starting your first job, or maybe your undergraduate year of college. I was going to start Code Complete next, but Pragmatic Programmer was so disappointing I decided to read fiction for the next few weeks instead. So to answer your question, the best language agnostic development books I've read are:…
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