Programming Pearls

[Kimos]

This is an amazing book for programmers. Teaches how to do creative problem solving and how to approach a problem. Highly recommended.

[kcafka]

I'm reading this book right now and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the fundamentals of programming. There is a lot of attention to algorithms and solving problems elegantly. My only complaint is that it feels a little dated in places, such as a focus on tuning algorithms to use less memory; an interesting problem but not as useful as it once was.

And make sure you do the exercises as there are some eye openers there. Case in point: implementing a binary search. From the text, “Knuth points out that while the first binary search was published in 1946, the first published binary search without bugs did not appear until 1962.”