Everybody has already mentioned most of the best books I've read, so I'll mention one that I haven't seen on this thread yet - The Little Schemer.
Unless you're actively working through a bunch of problems/examples, reading most books is a form of passive learning. That is, you are simply being told information. The Little Schemer is the only book I know of that is written almost entirely in the form of increasingly intricate questions to the reader (active learning). There are maybe about two dozen or so statements ("Laws" as the author calls them). Everything else is a question in an extended Socratic dialogue aimed at refining the reader's knowledge of Lisp, how computation arises from recursion, computation in general, and lambda calculus culminating in the y-combinator.
The Little Schemer is the most unique, most fun, most educational (in the sense that it _forces_ you to work your way through it) book that I've read. Moreover, it's a great way to grasp computation in a more abstract sense.
Unless you're actively working through a bunch of problems/examples, reading most books is a form of passive learning. That is, you are simply being told information. The Little Schemer is the only book I know of that is written almost entirely in the form of increasingly intricate questions to the reader (active learning). There are maybe about two dozen or so statements ("Laws" as the author calls them). Everything else is a question in an extended Socratic dialogue aimed at refining the reader's knowledge of Lisp, how computation arises from recursion, computation in general, and lambda calculus culminating in the y-combinator.
The Little Schemer is the most unique, most fun, most educational (in the sense that it _forces_ you to work your way through it) book that I've read. Moreover, it's a great way to grasp computation in a more abstract sense.