Bill the lizard has a great post listing books that programmers don't really read . In the post he points out that lots of people claim to have read titles such as the GOF patterns book, but haven't really :) He also suggests a list of books which programmers actually (probably) have read, such as Code Complete.
I'll confess to owning a copy of The Art of Computer Programming and never having read it. I have worked through some of the maths with a paper and pencil and I've used it as an infrequent reference but that's about it. I'm saving the rest of it for my retirement...
As for his other suggestions, I agree wholeheartedly. If you're looking for a comprehensive list of worthwhile holiday reading you could do worse than filling in the gaps in your book collection with these suggestions.
On another note, I noticed the following comment from 'anonymous'.
I graduated from Imperial(UK) around 2 years ago and have been programming for a well-known company in a well-paid job for just over a year now. I have read none of these books. Hurray!
Sadly, this attitude is quite prevalent amongst 'career coder drones' in the various industries I've worked in. It seems bizzare to me that people would be working in a field that they have little or no interest in - other than that of getting paid at the end of the month.
I suppose you can get away with it, but, as they say, 'those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it' and I'm sure it's unmotivated, bookshy coders like this that are responsible for the 'well-paid' contracts in 'well-known' companies that I keep getting offered to help fix their broken wheel reimplementations...
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