The Pragmatic Programmer

My favorites so far: - Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt - The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman - The Effective Engineer* by Edmond Lau - The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas - SQL Performance Explained by Markus Winand And http://teachyourselfcs.com curriculum is pretty good as well. As a side note, there's so much we can learn from game programmers and OS/database/compiler engineers.

+1 on the Pragmatic Programmer. For anyone that is ready to stop consuming themselves with all things esoteric and start writing generally good code by default. If more devs followed the relatively simple patterns and practices in this book the phrase "legacy code" might not be a curse-word.

Can you explain what you liked about The War of Art? I read it because I have seen it mentioned on this site many times, but I did not enjoy it at all. I found that the first two sections contained very little useful information, and the third got somewhat silly when it started evoking angels and muses. I could see it being a motivational read for some? I find it strange that it's mentioned in the same context as your #1 and #3, which I think are absolutely essential.

- The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt/Thomas) - Computer Architecture - A Quantitative Approach (Hennessy/Patterson) - Expert C Programming - Deep C Secrets (van der Linden) I woud call the Pragmatic Programmer though by far the most influential.