There was a time that I read every programming book front to cover (no Internet, few programming books in public libraries, not enough money to buy zillions of books, and loving reading all contributed to that) but some are more addicting than others. Looking at my bookshelves, I find many that stand out not only because I read them front to cover, but also because of their quality. Examples:
Inside Macintosh (especially the phonebook edition), (terse, but well-written, and describing a revolutionary system), but also some of the later books. For example,mtgs series on QuickDraw GX is tedious in it's repetition, but if you skip that, it nicely describes a very much complete 2D Graphics system.
How to solve it.
The art of computer programming (volumes 1, 2, and 3). What helped here is that my public library had them, but they are nice to read, if you have the mathematical background (it definitely helps to read this in parallel with a study in number theory, combinatorics, etc)
Anatomy of Lisp.
The art of the meta-object protocol.
Out of the inner circle.
The Soul of a new Machine.
Unix Internals, the new frontiers.
Effective C++.
SICP.
More recently, I found the C# specification a page turner. Easy to read, and almost every section made me think about why they chose to do things different from Java the way they did (examples: complicate the grammar by including structs, having signed and unsigned ints).
I second The Soul of A New Machine, what an incredible book.
It follows a team of engineers at Data General around 1980 as they race to build a new computer under incredible pressure.
It's an incredible story and anyone who has worked on a tightly knit team under high pressure will relate.
Effective C++ and More Effective C++ are both extremely well-written and technically informative. Importantly, they are also pretty approachable to non-whizes, but they teach important lessons (patterns and antipatterns, but very practical.)
Inside Macintosh (especially the phonebook edition), (terse, but well-written, and describing a revolutionary system), but also some of the later books. For example,mtgs series on QuickDraw GX is tedious in it's repetition, but if you skip that, it nicely describes a very much complete 2D Graphics system.
How to solve it.
The art of computer programming (volumes 1, 2, and 3). What helped here is that my public library had them, but they are nice to read, if you have the mathematical background (it definitely helps to read this in parallel with a study in number theory, combinatorics, etc)
Anatomy of Lisp.
The art of the meta-object protocol.
Out of the inner circle.
The Soul of a new Machine.
Unix Internals, the new frontiers.
Effective C++.
SICP.
More recently, I found the C# specification a page turner. Easy to read, and almost every section made me think about why they chose to do things different from Java the way they did (examples: complicate the grammar by including structs, having signed and unsigned ints).