Coders at work
Peter Seibel
Apress
601 pages
Read in 2012

"Programming is an unusually obscure craft; programmers usually work alone or in small groups and the most interesting parts of what they do happen in their heads where no one can see what is really going on. Then the artifacts programmers produce - code - is chewed up by a machine to produce runnable programs whose behavior is the only window most people will ever have into the programmer's work.
Further complicating matters, many programmers - even those who studied computer science in school - are autodidacts when it comes to programming. So most programmers know only how they themselves, and maybe a few co-workers, do the work of programming and how they themselves learned to do it.
This book tries to illuminate these obscured corners of the field."