Looking for books for casual reading which will help me increase my programming competence. I do not want books related to any specific field/domain/language or books with philosophy about "Software Development", "Managing", "Testing", etc. Although even if a book is tied to a particular language/domain but is a good read, it will do.
Please suggest....
I just read 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. This is definitely not an amazing book, but it covered a lot of "obvious" ground that may not be obvious to a beginner.
I also found Joel on Software entertaining (a collection of some of his blog posts).
I would recommend you to read a book about design patterns (e.g. the GoF book) and a book about algorithms (my favorite here is: Algorithm Design). Both will improve your programming skills and will be useful in every project.
The Productive Programmer: Theory in Practice
pretty decent read
When I wanted to learn the basics of the web I picked up a standard HTML book, a Javascript book and the XML blackbook.
When I wanted to learn Java I picked up the HeadFirst series of books (i.e. Head First Servlets & JSP).
When I moved from Java to .NET I picked up the APress books (WPF Pro, WCF, C#, ASP.Net 3.5, F#, etc). Mostly, they're written by Matthew MacDonald and are very easy to follow and use.
If you're purchasing them from a website like Amazon, the reviews there are generally spot on with what you'd get as far as reviews here.
Though, if you really wanna learn a language and it's code you should look into downloading the API library and looking at examples/source code. Nothing beats tinkering around with source code to see what changes effect what.
Programming Perl from O'Reilly (The Camel) is a really good read, and it teaches you programming, too!
To qualify: It's written by Larry Wall, the architect behind the language itself, and he is a zany guy. The book is interesting and fun to read, the examples are easy to follow (and generally funny). If you've never touched Perl before, it's also a lot of fun to program in. Just imagine C on LSD, and you end up with Perl.
The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike. It's a wonderful read. It doesn't confine you to a single language. They describe concepts in C, Java and awk.