Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?
by eatonphil on Hacker News.
Books like nand2tetris, Let Over Lambda, Lisp in Small Pieces, Hacker’s Delight are iconic. They aren’t required reading to do well in software but they are extremely interesting and are fairly easy to read (they are well edited). What other books are in this vein? Due to popularity, feel free to skip The Littler Schemer/MLer, HtDP, SICP, On Lisp, Thinking in Forth. And let’s skip history, biography books like Soul of a New Machine and Isaacson’s Jobs. And again, let’s skip books that you might actually consider required reading for experienced developers.