Given unlimited time, read all of them, learn all the languages. It will all help make you a better programmer in your preferred language. With limited time (as

Given unlimited time, read all of them, learn all the languages. It will all help make you a better programmer in your preferred language. With limited time (as a normal being), start with the top 100 books. Any of them. The next will be simpler than the first... I have an M.Sc. in Comp.Sci. Flicking through books like these, all the chapter titles resonate with courses, exams, and problems we solved. It also makes me realise I have probably forgotten more than I like to think. On the other hand, bashing my head against graph theory and logic, has made me a much better programmer. Similarly, the hours spent in Van Roy and Haridi's fairly abstract and technically language-agnostic "Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" made me primed to learn a lot of languages fast - because I had the primitives mastered.