The academic CS tomes never really gelled for me. It was .NET programmer Charles Petzold's guides that made things click http://www.charlespetzold.com/books.ht

The academic CS tomes never really gelled for me. It was .NET programmer Charles Petzold's guides that made things click http://www.charlespetzold.com/books.html http://www.charlespetzold.com/books.html I'd also give a shout out to Micheal Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book that taught me the adage "the best optimizer is between your ears" http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ Reference I keep close at hand is Ilya Grigorik's High Performance Browser Networking. Web apps with sub second latency can make all the difference https://hpbn.co/ https://hpbn.co/