B.W. Kernighan , D.M. Ritchie
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Cited by:
Professionally, Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language", first edition -- at the time I was reluctantly self-teaching myself how to program (my background being in hardware design) and that book struck me as a lightning bolt, totally changing my perspective about developing software for a living.
-- Alex Martelli