[equivalence]

The thing that struck me about some of the recommended reading on the list was that I suspect some of the books in the highly voted answers are probably not recommended texts on a good CS course (as is the author of the posts wish). I mean it's been a while since I took an undergraduate course but there were very few books recommended that looked at the more practical side of computer programming - apart from maybe in the first year of your course, and I'm assuming the author was looking for more in depth reading. Senior years on many CS courses tend to focus on theory behind topics which is something that I think is probably a lot harder to get motivated to read than say Code Complete. I mean you really have to want/need to learn Edmonds' graph matching algorithm as things like that are not comfortable reading. It's the reason why I think doing a CS course has some benefits as it's not often you are forced to approach the subject in that manner. That said, the accepted answer has probably provided a decent list of books with a more academic slant.