Very good point about specializing the reading list for the areas developers are interested in. You're right, trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all reading

Very good point about specializing the reading list for the areas developers are interested in. You're right, trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all reading list is foolhardy. Re: The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete, I learned a ton from those books and I'd heartily recommend them to programmers starting their first job or internship, but likely not to someone with a few months before their first round of programming interviews. What do you think? Maybe I will put together another list more tuned for general programming improvement versus interview-specific prep. As an aside, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture looks very useful, thank you for the pointer.