Original Post
The time has come again for me to blackmail my employer for some books since I don't have the time to put my educational benefits to proper use. So I'm looking for some recommendations! Some criteria: I do business dev work on a big system. Lots of little apps dealing with a database; some webapps, some not. All major languages are used, unix friendly. So gamedev specific books are out; they need to be at least arguably justified. There's no fixed budget, but I'd rather get 3 $50 books than 1 $150 book. And since I'm going to be learning on my own, I'll need to want to read the book. K&R, Knuth? Too dry. GoF, Josuttis? Just right. Some of the things I've been thinking about are a book that describes the how/why of functional programming. I've dabbled but not really gotten a good feel for it. If it teaches a interesting syntax, all the better. Haskell ideal, lisp derived languages bad. A book for a slightly fringe language. Something like Scala or Python. Seeing python makes me instinctively want to strangle something, but it'd be useful to know I think. Scala might also be useful/different to learn, and is more likely to be adopted at my workplace. A book to help me catch up on modern web design. A good algorithm/data structure/concurrency book/reference to fill in the gaps of self-teaching. A good practices/procedures book. And I'm certainly open to suggestions outside of that range. Something I've forgotten or overlooked. So, books I already have or have read in general order of enjoyment/usefulness (descending): GoF C++ Standard Library - Josuttis Code Complete Programming C# sql for smarties Applied Cryptography Posix Systems Programming perl5 by example Petzold's windows java in a nutshell effective C++ effective stl testing computer software o'reilly java webapps K&R C a random networking book, random OGL book, and 3-4 C++ bibles from the newb days.
