[unclesaamm]

I've read most of those books, and while I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading them, I don't think it's a great reading list either. You'll have to dig through a bit of cruft to get to the gems.

Partly, it's that programming books have such low lifespan that the ones that still get recommended after a decade are often deeply assimilated into programmer culture already. For example, when I read Clean Code and Pragmatic Programmer last year, I didn't find any of it to be interesting or remotely surprising - but I have been working at "agile" shops for a while, and perhaps those ideas were more revelatory when the books first came out.

Here's a more fun reading list, based off my own tastes. Maybe some of these are on the list, but I found it hard to scroll past a certain point as well:

- Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets

- The Nature of Computation

- The Little Schemer

- Programming Pearls

[tarsinge]

The Little Schemer is indeed a fun read, and it's relatively short and digestible (compared to SICP which I have on my reading list but is daunting to me). If you are used to languages with imperative loops it will give you a nice perspective on recursion. Slightly related but I found myself using Reduce/Fold pattern a lot more in my everyday languages after reading it.

Maybe following a tutorial in Erlang/Elixir might have the same effect, in addition to being more actual and practical, but also maybe less fun.

[dogma1138]

The only “programming” books I ever found useful we’re essentially computer science books that cover the basis of computational theory and computing concepts.

Anything that is more than a foundation is likely to be out of date by the time it’s published.

This especially holds true for modern (FoTM) languages and concepts.

So for the most part I stay away from practical books execept for the few ones that are set in stone.

Beyond that “philosophy” books can also be useful even if they are outdated simply because it makes you think and exposes you to other points of view and concepts that you can draw on.