I have a terrible problem with people recommending books that „changed their whatever”. And sometimes I think that it comes from an arrogant place where people being „influenced” by books is a bad place. But I do understand that sometimes books can change the way one thinks about things, and it makes sense to make a list of those.

For me, there are books that had a negative impact on my work. The GoF book is one such book, and its impact on my development is so distructive I can't even begin to explain. It's not only because it tries to codify coding as a sum of recipes, but people reading it end up with the scary idea that there is only one way of doing things, and that one way has a clear name, and a single possibility for implementation. The GoF buffs are those that keep stressing the most autoerotic interview question: „describe me one design pattern, other than Singleton”.

Now worse than people who read the GoF book are people who dove deeper into the issue and learned about more design patterns from other books. One such people screwed my career development for 7 years because at one internal interview he asked me out of nothing about the „half sync half async pattern”, that solves a problem that he wasn't able to describe to me. And since I failed, I was forever on their s*t list.

I think there are good books that can influence your life in a positive manner, but those are incremental changes, things that add a few things here and there. I would expect to see on lists that „changed careers” books on programming languages, like Kernighan & Ritchie on C, or Stroustrup's or Alexandrescu's books on C++. Or books on fundamentals, like Hennessy and Patterson, like Tannenbaum's Network or Operating systems, Knuth, or Cormen&al on Algorithms. But since I rarely do...