[ArtWomb]

The academic CS tomes never really gelled for me. It was .NET programmer Charles Petzold's guides that made things click

http://www.charlespetzold.com/books.html

I'd also give a shout out to Micheal Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book that taught me the adage "the best optimizer is between your ears"

http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/

Reference I keep close at hand is Ilya Grigorik's High Performance Browser Networking. Web apps with sub second latency can make all the difference

https://hpbn.co/