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Agile Web Development with Rails

By: Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, and Andreas Schwarz

Agile Web Development with Rails is the defacto-standard for learning the Ruby on Rails web framework. Now in its second edition, this book provides knowledge of the latest and greatest development techniques to aid in advanced web-based application development. It enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated applications using less code and less effort. This book contains sample applications using database migrations, Ajax, REST interfaces, and illustrates many new Rails features. There are new chapters on active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The web 2.0 and deployment chapters appear to have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. You can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site really simple. For learning Ruby on Rails, this book is simply the best available.

Best of Ruby Quiz

By: James Gray

The Best of Ruby Quiz contains twenty-five popular programming puzzles to help you sharpen your Ruby programming skills as you craft solutions. Some puzzles come with multiple solutions to help you see different ways of approaching the same problem. Inside you'll find interesting and challenging programming puzzles including: 800 Numbers, Crosswords, Cryptograms, Knight's Tour, Paper, Rock, Scissors, Tic-Tac-Toe, Texas Hold-Em, and more. This book contains some fairly advanced Ruby code, so it might not exactly be the best choice for a beginner.

Bioinformatics For Dummies

By: Jean-Michel Claverie and Cedric Notredame

Bioinformatics For Dummies is packed with valuable information that introduces you to the field of computational genomics. This book is an easy-to-follow guide that leads you step by step through every bioinformatics task that can be done over the Internet. It helps make sense of long equations, and provides hints for optimization of genetics applications that can otherwise slow down your computer. Some of the things you will learn when reading this book include how to work with DNA and protein sequences, conduct similarity searches, build multiple sequence alignments, edit and publish alignments, visualize proteins through 3-D structures, and construct phylogenetic trees.

C Programming Language

By: Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie

Most any respectable C programmer has read this book. As old as it is, it's still the defacto standard for learning C. It's concise and powerful (if somewhat dangerous), like C itself. Inside are hundreds of real-world code samples with clear explanations and commentary. A must-have for any serious C programmer.

C++: The Complete Reference

By: Herbert Schildt

C++: The Complete Reference covers everything from keywords, syntax, and libraries, to advanced features such as overloading, inheritance, virtual functions, namespaces, templates, and run-time type identification, plus there's a complete description of the Standard Template Library (STL). I found the book incredibly useful even when making really complicated programs because of the fact that it has everything in it. I can't really stress that point enough. Seriously, if you're getting a C++ book you are planning on actually using, you really should get this book.