Internet and Computers. We live in the computer age, and regardless of what you do, it will help you to develop some amount of computer skill. Creating web pages is remarkably easy, and even writing small programs to simplify repetitive tasks you do is possible with only a little effort. And even if you don't plan to do either of these things, knowing a little something about how to do them will help you better understand the world we live in. Plus, when people ask what your computer experience is, it's nice to tell them something other than, "I know how to use MS Word."
HTML: The Definitive Guide
You probably should learn some HTML, and reading a bit of this book will do it for you. I learned HTML solely from reading it (and from surfing the web and looking at various pages' source code) but don't hold my faults against this great work: it's instructive and a solid reference to boot..
Harley Hahn's Student Guide to UNIX
Learning UNIX, the operating system of most universities not to mention the Internet, will always mark you as a real studmuffin. But seriously, it's a powerful and fun operating system to use once you get through some of the jargon and other weirdness. Soon you'll be grepping, piping to sort and redirecting to a file, and using vi with ease. Check out this book: it's a lot less painful for beginners than reading man pages.
UNIX in a Nutshell
Once you've become a true UNIX troll, switch over to this handy and encyclopedic reference. It won't explain things in the baby steps Harley Hahn will, but it sure does have a lot of information...
The Art and Science of C
A great book to get your first exposure to programming with C, as well as just general programming. It explains basic topics in computing, but goes through all the things an introductory programming course should (stacks, queues, linked lists, recursion, files). One of the books I used in college.
The C Programming Language
The classic (new and revised of course) by Kernighan and Ritchie, the guys who invented C in the first place. If anyone knows the language, these guys are it. A little more difficult that The Art and Science of C, but well worth the effort.
The C++ Programming Language
Are you officially crazy? Do you dream in terms of objects, pointers, and memory allocation/deallocation? Is your name Bjarne? Yes? Then get this book. Otherwise, don't. It's pretty tough going. I myself hate using it and go to my easier C++ references for help when I'm in a bind. Still, even programming knuckleheads like me can gleam an occasional pearl of wisdom from this standby. At the very least, having this book on your shelf will make you look tough to people in the know.
ANSI Common Lisp
Lisp, a language for working with lists and structures of lists, is radically different from imperative languages like C/C++, Basic, or Java. In fact, it's very different from just about any language out there, except for its cousin Scheme. It's a little tricky at first, but with this book you'll be consing cdrs in no time. Learning Lisp is well off the beaten path, and is certainly unneccesary for most people. Nonetheless, playing around with it will get you thinking about solving problems in ways that aren't always obvious to the programmer stuck in a C-thinking rut. What's more, Lisp is considered to be one of the premier languages for work in Artifical Intelligence.
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