blast from the (recent) past

[bearophile]

Justin Johansson:

> "Beautiful Code"?

"Beautiful Code", it's not the best computer book, and some of the chapters are not so interesting, but overall is good enough:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046

Programming Pearls, I'd like several more books like this:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/

The wonderful "Turtle Geometry", maybe the best computer book I've read, it's for new programmers:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=7287

"Game Programming Gems", they use mostly C++, a nice series of books that show programming practice:
http://www.gameprogramminggems.com/

"Exploring Mathematics with Mathematica", this too is cute, but the Mathematica language itself is awful for programming, its line-oriented editor is terrible for programming (Notepad is better) and the Mathematica itself is really costly and Wolfram's ego is so huge that you can usually measure the diameter of your ego using just milliwolframs. So this books has some downsides too.
http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/Books/3525/

Bye,
bearophile