The Hacker's Dictionary (or Jargon File, if you prefer) introduced me to a wealth of tidbits about the programming field. Either directly or indirectly, it prom

The Hacker's Dictionary (or Jargon File, if you prefer) introduced me to a wealth of tidbits about the programming field. Either directly or indirectly, it prompted me to learn Emacs, TeX, and Lisp; to study Knuth; to volunteer for the GNU Project... but this was years ago, at a time when much of the contents of the book were somewhat historical, but still relevant. It's more out of date now, and perhaps wouldn't be as useful to novice programmers as it was for me.