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

I read Gallmeister's POSIX.4 with great zeal.

I have chill running down my spine from thinking that someone read Numerical Recipes from cover to cover without putting it down. No offense - but it's an incredibly dense book. In particular the code samples take a lot of effort to really chew through, at least for me.

The average programming book is pretty awful - many seem to be sold by weight. If you skew towards those recently published, there's a very high concentration of instantly obsolete books that cover surface details of the current incarnation of rapidly changing technology. There are real incentives for the programming book publishing industry to churn out tedious garbage: People buy 'em, instant obsolescence means the same people replace 'em.

Older books aren't necessarily better, but those remaining have been through a generation or two of garbage collection already, making it easier to find the good ones. Excellent books have been published recently, of course (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/, http://landoflisp.com/), it's just easier to find them in hindsight.

Books about parsing techniques* rather than ANTLR (or whatever) specifically, language semantics and implementation techniques rather than an awful 200 lb. Wrox book with a mug shot on the cover, etc. tend to stay relevant for much longer. Rather than reading yet another API guide, check out _The Art of the Interpreter_ (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-...). Also, CiteSeer (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/) is a gold mine.

I haven't gotten _Hackers Delight_ yet, but it's on my list.

* Recommended: Dick Grune's _Parsing Techniques, a Practical Guide_. Lots of deep content, but would still be worth it for the bibliography alone.

I tend to get too distracted to give many books the cover-to-cover treatment. Some great ones that made the cut were:

1) Metaprogramming Ruby.

2) The Art of Rails.

3) Ruby Design Patterns

4) Services-Oriented Architecture in Ruby

These stick out for me. Even if the last one in the list felt a little "rushed to production", it still covered important topics you won't find anywhere else. Plus I find when a book has typos (either in the text or in the code), that just makes me engage with it a little bit more.

C# in Depth by Jon Skeet.

Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform by Andrew Troelsen (there's a newer edition about .NET 4 which I haven't managed to read yet)