I appreciated "The Art of UNIX Programming" (ESR), because it clearly demonstrates the value of the "do one small thing well" approach to software. While it's a bit of a refresher to Unix veterans, it still has lots of interesting examples of well-designed programs that uphold Unix design principles (e.g. flexible, simple, transparent). I've seen plenty of developers over the years who've been "tainted" with the Monolithic Blob approach to software design, people who ought to read this book cover-to-cover.

My bookshelf has been all fiction for about 6 years now. Technical books are more or less obsolete, the only ones I can remember buying in all that time is the Samba administrators guide from O'Reilly (useless.) and Stuart Cheshire's Zeroconf book (delightfully written, I could read it for pleasure but no help at all in really getting to grips with Zeroconf from an implementer's point of view.)

I still have some classics which I refer to from time to time. The camel book in particular, since there exists no better reference to Perl's core APIs. However, for anything else the web is a far better reference library.

I try to keep all my non-fiction cataloged at LibraryThing. I've been kind of sloppy entering tags, so most books aren't tagged. I suppose I should fix that. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Tangurena

As you can tell from the already tagged books, I'm primarily a .NET developer.

Books that are currently nearby: Art of Electronics, The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design, The Intelligent Investor, Fooled by Randomness, Front Panel, SICP, TPU Microcoding for Beginners, Planar Microwave Engineering, This Is Your Brain on Music, three of the Tufte books, etc.

My bookshelf: http://www.ur-ban.com/library/

Hackers and Painters, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Prism of Grammar