| This is probably going to devolve again into a long discussion, but here's the books with an academic bent that I was most impressed with (many of them 25 years ago, of course): "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman (a.k.a the "Dragon Book")
"The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth
"Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation" by John E. Hopcroft and Jeffrey D. Ullman An amazing book, despite the fact that the core thesis of the first edition, that we were on the verge of permanent world domination by RISC architectures, turned out to be dead wrong: "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson Two books by Niklaus Wirth (A bit out of fashion, maybe because they were written in the "wrong" languages, and maybe because they were TOO concise in today's world of shovelware books. Wirth is the Strunk & White of CS writers): "Algorithms and Data Structures" by Niklaus Wirth
"Compiler Construction" by Niklaus Wirth This book might be the one that impressed me most in my undergraduate studies, although I can't say I've done much with what I read there: "Parallel Program Design: A Foundation" by K. Mani Chandy and Jayadev Misra |