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:

  1. The Elements of Programming Style
  2. Classics in Software Engineering
  3. Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling
  4. Pascal User Manual and Report
  5. Computer and the Brain
  6. Selected Writings on Computing
  7. Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation
  8. Compiler Construction
  9. The Relational Model for Database Management: Version 2
  10. A Programming Language
  11. Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata
  12. Writing Efficient Programs
  13. Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines
  14. The Multics System
  15. Operating System Principles
  16. IBM System/360 Principles of Operation
  17. Mindstorms
  18. The Architecture of Concurrent Programs
  19. Structured Programming
  20. 201 Principles of Software Development
  21. Artificial Intelligence
  22. MacIntosh Human Interface Guidelines
  23. Cryptography and Data Security
  24. Essays in Computing Science
  25. Anatomy of LISP

Of these, I’ve heard of seven, and read five.