The book every programmer should read is Programming Pearls, isn't it? :-)

I wish there was a modern version of _Software Tools_ -- the Pascal version is dated, and the RATFOR version might as well be on stone tablets.

(I'm guessing some recent Unix-programming-environment books cover a lot of the stuff in _ST_, but I haven't read 'em).

Way back in the early nineties, when I was in college, I went to go visit my friend at his school. He had class, so I went to the library to kill a few hours. I dug through the (rather ancient) CS section, and pulled some books to read. Two have stuck with me:

One was __The Mythical Man-Month__ (the old one, not any of the reissues). That put into words so many things that I felt about computer programming, if nothing else the humanness of programming as a pursuit.

The second was __Software Tools__. Even then, whichever version I encountered was ancient (I was learning C in school). It didn't impact me quite as much as TMMM (which I think i read most of in the library), but it was enough for me to remember and pick up a used copy a few years back.

I still haven't read it, so I'm glad you reminded me about it.

As far as a modern book, the one that seems closest to me is __The Practice of Programming__.

I believe it would be a graph, but there's also a "hashmap cache" with O(1) access for the most used nodes of the graph indexed by keywords or key-actions :)

I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting the traffic generated by Hacker News and Techcrunch, it fails all the time