Language/tech specific books which improve vendor-neutral development skills

Question

If I ask what the following books have in common: "Accelerated C# 2010, C# in Depth, Pro C# 2008", the answer would be that they would help me to improve my understanding of C# and secondly, my general coding skills.

What language-specific/tech-specific books (like those named above) would teach me a great deal about general programming techniques and good habits?

I'm thinking Java books would be very good for me (I code in C# primarily), as both these languages are similar and so I am sure that specialist books on Java threading, performance tuning, etc, can be applied to C# (not all 100% content of a Java book).

Thanks

Answer 1

I would suggest these technology-neutral books:

• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Code Complete

A technology-specific book will generally only teach you technology-specific things (not always but most often).

Answer 2

In addition to the two mentioned by Andrew Hare, two of my favorites:

• Head First Design Patterns
• Martin Fowler's Refactoring