[engi_nerd]

I keep a wide variety of references around this desk. Some of my favorites:

Manuel Lima's "Visual Complexity", "The Book of Circles", and "The Book of Trees". These are useful as references and as visualization inspiration.

Jacques Bertin's "Semiology of Graphics". Gorgeous and immensely useful.

Desmond and Nicholas Higham's "MATLAB Guide, 3rd Edition", and Yair Altman's "Accelerating MATLAB Performance". Both are invaluable for serious MATLAB work.

Titus A. Beu's book on Numerical Programming is very good as a reference.

For anyone needing to work on military simulations, "Engineering Principles of Combat Modeling and Distributed Simulation" by Tolk is the best reference I have found on the subject.

And TAOCP and CLRS are here for reference purposes as well.