I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Mythical Man Month, which despite its age is still delightfully sane and readable.
One of my favourites is _Inner Loops_ by Rick Booth (http://cseng.aw.com/book/0,,0201479605,00.html), for its sheer enthusiasm. A book-length hymn to the joys of performance coding, and the perfect antidote to yet more bollocks about "methodology". Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest is commendable in its scope and a useful book to have around, but it hardly makes its topic come alive. I'd say the same for the dragon, actually; though some of you will disagree I bet. Richard Stevens would have the lot of them in a technical writing fight. If you want to get properly theoretical, check out volume 1 of the _Handbook of Logic in Computer Science_. It's beautiful, weighty and reassuringly expensive. It consists of 6 monographs (each of which could have been published as a book in itself), introducing a particular branch of the subject and expounding on it in depth. It's neither patronising like a textbook nor hopelessly impenetrable. And if you do get lost among the Lemmas, you can always close it and admire the interlocked quantifier symbols embossed on the front. .robin.
