The ACM's Top 25
Between October 2005 and January 2006, the ACM polled its professional members, asking them to nominate and then vote for books they considered classics. The final list is:
- The Elements of Programming Style
- Classics in Software Engineering
- Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling
- Pascal User Manual and Report
- Computer and the Brain
- Selected Writings on Computing
- Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation
- Compiler Construction
- The Relational Model for Database Management: Version 2
- A Programming Language
- Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata
- Writing Efficient Programs
- Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines
- The Multics System
- Operating System Principles
- IBM System/360 Principles of Operation
- Mindstorms
- The Architecture of Concurrent Programs
- Structured Programming
- 201 Principles of Software Development
- Artificial Intelligence
- MacIntosh Human Interface Guidelines
- Cryptography and Data Security
- Essays in Computing Science
- Anatomy of LISP
Of these, I’ve heard of seven, and read five.