[Jun8]

Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets by van der Linden (everybody just has to buy this book, even if you're not doing any programming. The jokes and the anecdotes are alone worth it.

I liked most books from Addison Wesley's C++ In Depth Series edited by Stroustrup, they are all thin (around ~300 pages), esp. Exceptional C++.

[drv]

Just Java by the same Peter van der Linden was also quite good humor-wise, although I haven't read it in years (it was released around the same time as the first JDK). It's significantly thicker, though, since it covers a broader range of topics like networking and GUIs.

The best of the humor is contained in sidebars dubbed "light relief"; I seem to remember a passage indicating the author was not invited to write a specification because the other authors "didn't want any light relief in it" or something to that effect.