10 of 10.
I'm only 16 years late on this one. This book is about DG's race to build a machine to contend with DEC's VAX, and has some great story telling. It reads almost like a fiction book, with great character building, a nice storyline running through the book, etc. The geek factor is low on this one, though I suppose it _is_ a book about a bunch of geeks building hardware, so it's a little up there. Evidently it won the Pulitzer prize.

10 of 10.
Another one in the category of "how the heck did I not read this sooner?" This book is a collection of essays on various programming tasks, and gives tons of insight on engineering software in general. The prose is even entertaining too. This book now occupies a special place on my bookshelf.

10 of 10.
This is a very down-to-earth, pragmatic overview of concurrency in Java. It even has chapters on testing and debugging, which get very little coverage in most articles but are clearly important. Though its focus is on Java, many of the ideas are more general, and thus it's a must-read for any serious Windows or .NET concurrency programmer. It's not as good as my upcoming book, but given that you can't buy mine yet, it will do for now ;).

8 of 10.
I'm sure everybody who reads my blog reads Raymond's too. If you do, then the book will be quite familiar to you. It's a collection of essays, most of which are edited versions of ones that have appeared on Raymond's blog in the past. I really like the layout and organization of chapters. One downside: Raymond apparently tried to keep it from becoming too geeky (he mentions several times, "for you non-programmers, you can skip this chapter"), but c'mon: how many non-programmers are actually going to read this book? IMHO he should have just let loose and never looked back.

8 of 10.
This book is a collection of classic articles by precisely what the book's title suggests, software pioneers: Friedrich L. Bauer (ALGOL), Ole-Johan Dahl (Simula), Niklaus Wirth (Pascal), Fred Brooks (Mythical Man Month, OS/360), Alan Kay (GUIs), Rudolf Bayer (B-trees), Peter Chen (E/R modeling), Edsger Dijkstra (obvious), Tony Hoare (CSPs, axiomatic semantics), David Parnas, John Guttag (abstract data types), Michael Jackson (JSP), Tom DeMarco (structured analysis), Michael Fagan (code inspection), Barry Boehm (engineering economics) and Erich Gamma (design patterns). Most of the papers are available on the net, but having them in a printed hardcover is really nice. There are also some new write-ups and an accompanying CD which contains talks from all of the above people. Nice.

8 of 10.
An overview of Timothy Budd's APL compiler, from front to back end. (For those not up on APL, it's a great language. See the next item.) Also contains a chapter on compiling high level program statements to vector ISAs, which is quite timely and interesting.

8 of 10.
This is the best overview and reference book on APL I've encountered to date. For $120, you get the cheesiest binding and printing ever, so be prepared to be disappointed in that department, but the content is well worth it. Covers APL from start to finish and has some handy reference charts.

8 of 10.
I picked this book up after reading Larry Osterman's blog entry about how acquiring a critical section in OS/2 effectively suspended all threads in the system until it was released. Sure enough, that's how it worked. Funny. Anyway, this book was fun because it takes you back in time, and, since Gordon was the chief architect for OS/2, the writing gives a ton of insight into software design and architecture when OS/2 was being developed. Though there is plenty of detail which is fairly useless today (like how to specifically use DosCWait), I enjoyed skimming it.

7 of 10.
In the style of Soul of a New Machine (see above), this book takes you through the development of Chandler, a start -up software project lead by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus. I generally agree with most of the reviews on Amazon: the book idea was good, the writing is very good, but the project he chose to follow was crap. As far as I know, Chandler is now dead, and the start-up didn't seem like a place buzzing with immensely passionate people, no matter how hard the author tried to convey that. He should have chosen Windows Vista or something ;).

10 of 10.
This is THE book on molecular gastronomy, literally. Hervey basically invented the field, from what I understand, and this book is a great collection of easy-to-read essays on the topic. You'll walk away with a better scientific understanding of what cooking is all about, including how various new-age techniques work, and perhaps even the confidence to try some of it out on your own. This is a must read for any serious food geek.

10 of 10.
In this book, the author enrolls at the Cullinary Institute of America (CIA) and goes through basically the full cirriculum. The book is written excellently, and you feel like you're right there in class with him. And you certainly walk away with a deep and lucid appreciation for those who are slaves to the knife, cooking up delicious food because they love it. I was considering a stint at the CIA ... until I read this ... I'm now convinced that I couldn't handle it ;).

10 of 10.
So many of you probably don't know that I'm a music geek too. I write a lot of material -- actually, I've been writing a whole lot more lately -- though I don't play live at all anymore. This book has some light introduction to music theory, but the great part is the way the author dives into cognitive neuroscience and the effect of music on people, their brains, and their psychology. The book is incredibly unique and will instill a newfound appreciation of every nuance of that next breakbeat you hear.

10 of 10.
Great follow-up to The Making of a Chef. The delves into the make-up of a chef, starting with the master chef exam at the CIA, and then profiling two chefs: Michael Symon (Lola) and Thomas Keller (French Laundry, per se). While the whole thing is great, the 1/3 of the book devoted to Thomas Keller makes the book wortwhile.

10 of 10.
I couldn't put this book down for a whole weekend, and then I was sad when it was done. The writing is extraordinary, and makes you feel like you're there, learning to make various pastas, to be a line cook at Babbo in New York, to try and learn what you can from Mario, and to travel to Italy to learn from some very interesting characters indeed. Easily one of my favorite reads from 2006.

9 of 10.
After reading Kitchen Confidential, I couldn't not read A Cook's Tour. Anthony is extremely entertaining, crude, and raw. That's what he does best. This is the book version of his late TV show with the same title. In it, he travels the world, tasting regional cuisines and reporting "from the trenches". Lots of mouth watering street food, bizzare encounters, exotic beverages, etc. If you can't afford to do a foodie world-tour yourself, this is the next best thing.

9 of 10.
This book needs little introduction. It won the Pulitzer prize, after all. The book describes how certain socieites came to dominate various geographies of the world, including (as the title suggests) the role of guns, germs (disease), and steel in the process. For obvious reasons, the writing is a tad dry, but it's so jam packed full of interesting data and written incredibly methodically, both of which more than make up for the dryness.

9 of 10.
This book takes you through many different forms of eating, from corn and our new industrialized food system, to farming, to hunting and foraging, and beyond. Each section concludes with a meal characteristic of one particular style of food creation. Though at times the writing gives a hint of an agenda, the writing is generally excellent, and many facts are presented for consideration.

8 of 10.
This is the third of Ruhlman's XXX of a Chef series of books, and I really enjoyed it. This one looks at chefs and their influence inside and outside of the kitchen. That includes Grant Achatz (of Alinea), how he studied under Keller and became an American pioneer of molecular gastronomy, various Food TV celebs, and so on. Great read.

8 of 10.
Sometime in 2005, I stumbled across the archive of Warren Buffet's letters to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, dating back to 1977. I immediately printed them all out and have a stack of many 1,000 pages in my office to this day. Though they are fairly lengthy, there are many great lessons to be learned from reading them. This book is an edited down version of those essays. Very edited and abridged, actually, but some of the more important points are pulled out and analyzed. And the best part is that if you want to drill into more detail, all of the letters are available online.

7 of 10.
All wine lovers need to read this. I gave it 7 out of 10 simply because the writing style is actually pretty bad IMHO. But the content itself is great, and of historical signifciance. Wikipedia has a page on the event, but in summary, in 1976 many Bordeaux 1st growths, etc. were pitted against various California winemakers in a blind tasting. The tasting was held in Paris, and the judges were all French. Everybody believed the US wines would fall short, but it turned out that the US fared quite well: the book is the story of events leading up to and including this tasting.

7 of 10.
To be entirely honest, this book was VERY entertaining, but fell a bit short of my expectations. This is a collection of fairly disjoint essays, almost the kind of thing you'd expect to see on a blog. Each reads very well on its own, but it lacked the kind of cohesive feel I was looking for. Nevertheless, Anthony is always entertaining, crude, funny, and makes me laugh. This book was no exception.