Programming books to read while on vacation?
SwellJoe: Try some fiction, instead.  It's a vacation. I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy a couple of weeks ago. It's really good.That said, if you're going to read programming books, you might want narrative texts rather than "practical" books, since the practical ones require you to also have a computer, and work through the examples and such. Books like Programming Pearls, Beautiful Code, etc. tell stories about code, rather than just show you code (though there are probably moments in either book where the best course of action is to try applying what you've read about).