Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?

I treat Numerical Recipes like a bank robbery: get in and get out.

I look up the ONE solution I need, read the associated 2-3 pages, and put it away for another few months.

These had high I-want-to-read-itosity, I thought:

Abelson and diSessa, Turtle Geometry

Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Aho and Weinberger and Kernighan, The AWK Programming Language

Andrew Appel, Compiling With Continuations

Jon Bentley, More Programming Pearls

Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls

Leo Brodie, Thinking FORTH

W. H. Burge, Recursive Programming Techniques

Carriero and Gelernter, How to Write Parallel Programs

A. K. Dewdney, The New Turing Omnibus

Edsger Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Computation

Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer

Friedman and Wand and Haynes, Essentials of Programming Languages [1st edition]

James F. Gimpel, Algorithms in Snobol4

Paul Graham, On Lisp

Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

Grune and Jacobs, Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide

Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine

Kernighan and Pike, The Practice of Programming

Kernighan and Pike, The Unix Programming Environment

Kernighan and Plauger, Software Tools in Pascal

Donald Knuth, Literate Programming

Glenn Krasner (editor), Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice

Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work

Wm Leler, Constraint Programming Languages

Liskov and Guttag, Abstraction and Specification in Program Development

Peter Norvig, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming

Chris Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures

Richard O'Keefe, The Craft of Prolog

P. J. Plauger, Programming on Purpose I. (and II and III)

P. J. Plauger, The Standard C Library

Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface

Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Toby Segaran, Programming Collective Intelligence

Toffoli and Margolus, Cellular Automata Machines

Niklaus Wirth, Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler

Witten, Moffat, & Bell, Managing Gigabytes

(mostly from my old list at http://wry.me/~darius/personal/books.html)

Absolutely. His Zen of Code Optimization is also a great book.

Learning Perl. C Programming Language. UNIX Programming Environment. Programming in Haskell.

Code Complete. Practice of Programming.

Cathedral and the Bazaar. Open Sources. Hackers and Painters. Joel on Software. Coders at Work. Just for Fun.

SICP seems to be really well written so far, but it's not the kind of book you're going to read in one sitting.

Microprocessors: A Programmers View (Computing That Works) : This is an older book and had fascinating explanations about how CISC (i386) processors worked and a comparison against RISC type processors and the implications for programmers. This book has fascinating historical info and if I recall correctly had a great amount of humor regarding the development of the various types of processors. Out of date now though and hard to get I think. An Amazon link if someone's interested: http://www.amazon.com/Microprocessors-Programmers-View-Compu...