On Lisp

On Lisp by Paul Graham

* Getting Things Done by David Allen This book taught me so much about how to manage my life, and taught me how to review my own systems. * SICP, On Lisp, and Let over Lambda It's hard to pick one exactly, because really it's about opening your mind to radically different programming paradigms than what's popular. Learning lisp well enough gives you confidence to attempt to create new programming languages, through code generation, or even mentally thinking about an API as a language rather than just a series of functions.

Metamathematics by Kleene. On Lisp by Graham. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte.

3 so far: 1. Elements of Computing Systems 2. On Lisp 3. Game Engine Architecture Edit: 2 -> 3

Knuth: he's an excellent writer with a sense of humor. Anything coauthored by Kernighan is a good bet, though the material is not quite so ageless. Similar remarks for P.J. Plauger. Norvig doesn't just write exquisite code, but good prose too. I always liked Abelson & Sussman's style, even though it's more textbookish. Abelson also co-wrote Turtle Geometry, which is almost unknown these days and still eye-opening. (It's more of a math book than a programming one, but its point is to be both.) Daniel Hillis: The Pattern on the Stone, The Connection Machine. Richard O'Keefe, The Craft of Prolog. Jon Bentley. I remember pg's On Lisp as good.