Great programming books you read in 2009?
hga: Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael L. Scott: The explanations of many things I'd read in other sources are no less than fantastic, I now understand a bunch of things I had only superficially "got" previously.  http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-..., check out the overview and reviews.Coders at Work by Peter Seibel: By far the best of this type of book (well, not counting the '80s classic Programmers at Work which I haven't read since then), one of the best Lisp authors interviews in depth a lot of really interesting and/or important people, from James Zawinski to Donald Knuth, with Javascript, static FP and PARC people, Guy Steele, Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen (really important interview which points out how C/C++ to the exclusion of truly high level languages have been a disaster when used beyond their proper niches), etc.  All are masters who've gotten their hands dirty, many are theory people as well.  http://www.amazon.com/Coders-at-Work-Peter-Seibel/dp/1430219...Garbage Collection by Jones Lins: Pretty much the only book in the field (except for the forthcoming Advanced Garbage Collection sequel in the middle of this year), covers the territory as of the mid-90s.  Much more fun than trying to track down 100 individual papers and trying to make sense of it all.  Exposition is clear and you get a real feeling for the subtleties of the field (especially when you try fun things like generational and/or concurrent GC).  http://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Algorithms-Automati...