Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever
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The author said that he explicitly left out books on technology. Sure there is a lot of technology cruft out there, but surely there a few language specific books that a good software engineer should read. Or maybe I'm just a hacker.
CLRS is on the list; 28.
And I, likewise, was unhappy with his exclusion of technology-specific texts. It seems as though he is asserting that generalizable ideas can only come from books that purport to be general.
It's a pretty good list, and I think he did a pretty decent job. Sure, everybody's list would be different, but there are some really good books on there that would serve people well to read them. It's interesting that Psychology of Computer Programming didn't make the list, as it frequently does.
It'd be nice to see another list without the exclusions though. K&R (C) and the Llama (Perl) book especially were very helpful to me. SICP made the list, and I kinda consider that a Scheme book.. I certainly learned plenty of programming/CS from other language-specific book. The 4.4 BSD book helped a lot of people too. Had I come up later, Accelerated C++ is a really nice book too.
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
The critics one is decent, if a bit off (Ulysses 1: yes, Great Gatsby 2: hardly), but the Ayn-Rand-meets-L-Ron-Hubbard on the other side always makes me laugh, even though I'm a fan of Rand.
I'm sure they released a result more to gain popularity through controversy than they did to get a truly accurate reading. And it worked, since theirs is always the one I've heard named when people discuss "great books," and it always gets people angry.
Generally, they are the ones that are specifically tied to the act of software development, of making things and getting good at doing that well, rather than the process and other roles surrounding it.
But then it seems that, given the definition from SWEBOK and others like http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?SoftwareEngineer, software engineering is more about the process than the product. So this list may be correct, and the reason I don't hear about some of these titles so much is because I'm not as much a part of the process crowd.