My top 5 pick

1. Clean Code by Unble Bob
2. Code Complete by Steve Mcconnell
3. Refactoring by Kent Beck
4. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
5. Test Driven Development by Kent Beck

@Todd covered it. Here is my take on some new classics along with old ones.

1. Clean code by Uncle Bob
2. Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Bhargava
3. Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave
4. Head First Design Patterns
5. Designing Data Intensive applications by Martin Kleppmann

If you want to learn programming/coding...

1. Let US C (Yashavant Kanetkar)
2. Let Us C Solutions.
3. Exploring C and Test your C skills (My favourites)
4. Object Oriented Programming with C++
5. Getting Real by DHH.

I believe these Devs should be read at least once in coding life.

This is actually a very difficult question because it depends entirely on what the programmer's current duties and goals are.

Given those categories, I'll go with:

Code organization: Clean Code by Uncle Bob

Object-Oriented: Gang of Four's book and Code Complete by Steve McConnell

Algorithms and Data Structures: Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakman McDowell

Programming Language: Kernighan and Ritchie (K&R) C

Now that that's over, I have a few comments. Some of these books, while great, are also very cliche... If you find a particular book that interests you, I urge you to read some pages and if you like it, read that. I'm extremely against training up a clone army of software engineers who just do as they're told by the authors above... I think that's extremely dangerous and counterproductive to progression. Nevertheless, these are great books and will help a programmer establish a great foundation and even ethics. Also note that these are GENERALIZED BOOKS... But no means are ANY of these books (aside from maybe K&R C) specialized in any way... For in-depth topics, you need more than 5 books, my friend.

I chose K&R C not because it's even C but because the authors write extremely concise code... Stuff like:

void strcpy(char* s, char* t){
    while((*s++ = *t++) != '\0')
    ;
}

Look at that code... It does so much in so little space. And while some would say it's ugly and/or "not readable," I think it's important for an engineer to be exposed to this kind of code to both see the capability of the programming language's constructs, but also to get a little better at deciphering dense code.

This is my list (and I only have three)

• ​The Algorithm Design manual by Steven Skiena.
• OOP in C++ by Saurav Sahay (I don't think I have seen anyone else introduce OOP more precisely).
• Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.

Thanks Betty for the invitation. Personally, I find the following books very helpful during engineering.

1. Head First Java from O'Reilly
2. The complete Reference Java by Herbert Schildt
3. Programming in C (3rd Edition) - Stephen Kochan
4. Introduction to Algorithms 3e
5. Thinking in C++