Well, it's hard to think of anything radically unique. But some memorable things that come to mind: - the way Graham, Knuth & Patashnik's Concrete Mathematics

Well, it's hard to think of anything radically unique. But some memorable things that come to mind: - the way Graham, Knuth & Patashnik's Concrete Mathematics has the students' comments, silly or enlightening, in the margins. Its also very well designed and put together. - I absolutely love the design of Sedgewick & Wayne's Algorithms (4th ed.) The fonts, colour palette, diagrams illustrating algorithms etc, are all miraculously awesome. The next algorithms book I looked at seemed so tedious and incompetent I wanted to complain. - I love raganwald's JavaScript Allongé apart from the pictures. But there are pictures throughout of coffee, coffee machines, coffee bushes etc with coffee-related captions, all totally unrelated to the text, that somehow work, like a breath of fresh air through the book. - Needham's Visual Complex Analysis is a marvel of clarity in word and picture. - Eloquent Javascript (I read the online version[0]) is impressively well-designed. A good mix of covering-the-basics and projects. A clean, simple and beautiful form. [0] http://eloquentjavascript.net/ http://eloquentjavascript.net/