O'Reilly has a interesting book series with essays on computer science related topics. The series consist of 6 titles.
What are your experiences with these books? Are they all interesting to a general programming audience?
(please limit your answer to one book for easy voting)
Beautiful Code is certainly something you should check out if you're interested in seeing what the CS community considers excellent design and construction of code. The discussions are well written (by community leaders) and they typically go through a small body of code in good granularity. For example, the first article (written by Brian Kernighan) discusses the creation of a simple and powerful regular expression matcher. This example is small enough that he can discuss the code itself, including what each section does and what future modifications could be made to enhance functionality.
Each example is written by a different leader, so you get a set of viewpoints instead of the viewpoint of a single author. Finally, there are also over 30 essays in the book - it doesn't shy away from content. I recommend this one.
I have all these books and can heartily recommend them. The choice of subjects is diverse and the articles are well written and edited.
The architecture and security books are among the best.
These books are part of a bigger series called Theory in Practice and I can recommend Neal Fords book The Productive Programmer as well.
Beautiful Teams is the first book I came across in the series. Actually I bought it as a gift to my manager (I lost a bet with him; nevertheless an excellent fellow!). I loved the cover, started browsing through the book; eventually the book was so wonderful I ended up reading top to bottom.
The most interesting thing is that you get to read about variety of very different teams something you may never come across personally e.g. team that built software for space missions; their troubles, practices, what worked, what didn't work, etc.
I am reading Beautiful Architecture now. I loved to read about KDE development team. Things that you will never hear about in commercial development e.g. requirements from government organization/ corporates/ or a home user all are of same priority and considered on equal measure; or how architecture gets evolved in an environment that doesn't have corporate hierarchy; or how innovation is more easily possible in a culture where doing-it-for-love-of-it than what-is-the-return-on-investment culture.
You may agree to the opinions or disagree; in fact, many of the opinions are contradicting between chapters; but to me O'Reilly's Beautiful series is simply..hmm..beautiful!