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The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte.

If you ever need to give a presentation or write a report that uses any graphs or charts, this book gives simple guidelines that makes the visual information as clear as possible.

I'm just finishing the last book of the The Baroque Cycle, and it's pretty good. I recommend making it through.

The System of the World by Neal Stephenson - for pleasure

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide - for fun

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - for work

Effective C++ by Scott Meyers - for work

More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers - for work

I went for a master's degree (actually two) and don't regret a day or dollar spent. The upper division CS courses are wonderful for a mathematical mind. It brought together everything learned in undergraduate CS and Math courses into practical, real world, mathematical applications such as machine learning, natural language processing, data mining and others.

Today I'm a software engineer at a company that requires MS degrees for all their developers and it's a good environment - although I'm still looking for a place where I can leverage both my master's degrees.

I have never met a programmer who couldn't write C++. Python is definitely a good place to start as you can quickly code up something cool.