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The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein
Oath Of Fealty and Footfall, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Chanur Saga, The Faded Sun trilogy, and the Foreigner Sequence, C. J. Cherryh
The Bolo series, Keith Laumer, and follow-on books by a number of authors
I have reached a stage with each of these that I have to exert a lot of self-control on how often I re-read them.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Bah you really are old school - nothing new to read here.
The OP is just fishing for new authors to read, thankfully there were a few new ones in the other posts. You would probably like my library, every one of the above is in there.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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The OP asked for our favorites, not what we were reading currently. I just finished reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past[^] trilogy by Liu Cixin[^]. I'm also a fan of N.K. Jemisin and John Scalzi, an almost neighbor of mine (he lives about 50 miles south of me).
Software Zen: delete this;
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For that matter, Cherryh has a new novel in the Foreigner Sequence coming out in the not-too-distant future.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Add the Expanse series to that list, and the Belgarion / Mallorean series as well. Oh, and the "Ender" books.
Then ... Douglas Adams deserves to be there, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", "The Devil Drives" by Fawn M Brody,
And ... oh gawd: Niven, Pournelle, Philip K Dick, ... without whom ...
heck I can't pick my favourite 100 books, much less order them into a sequence and say "these are the best five", or "ten", or "twenty"! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Oh bugger - more: Forward, Laumer, Hawking, Norm Abram, Brin, ... the list just gets bigger every time I try to think of it ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Here are a couple off the top of my head;
Hawaii - James A. Mitchner
The Last days of Pompeii
I have I Robot coming at xmas.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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Hopefully it is the one feom the 50's not the one from the movie..
ed
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Yeah me too. Xmas present from my son, I didn't specify edition. Probably should of!
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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"I shall wear midnight" - Pratchett.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Agree, there are far too many, but a few more worthwhile:
Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere, American Gods, Stardust, Coraline
KJ Parker - Engineer's Trilogy
Garth Nix - The Old Kingdom (Sabiral, Lorial, Clariel, etc)
Jasper Fforde - The Thursday Next series
Ben Elton - Two Brothers and Time and Time Again are both brilliant, but so are most of his books
Umberto Eco - Name of the Rose, The Island of the Day Before, Foucault's Pendulum
Luke Rhienhart - The Dice Man
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Thank you, fishing for new authors I see, picked up a couple of potentials.
I'm with OG, who the hell can list only 5 favourite authors let alone books.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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As others have already said, far too many. 
Just throwing "The Laundry Files[^]" series by Charles Stross into the mix.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
I read this over 10 years ago, but it still stands out as the most gripping non-fiction book I have ever read. Oppenheimer led the Los Alamos project to develop the atomic bomb and then, having realised what he'd done, sensibly announced that dropping atomic bombs on people was a bad idea. This resulted in a Government witch hunt, led by J. Edgar Hoover, accusing him of being a communist.
It's a fairly long read, (around 600 pages), but gives a real insight into a complex genius and polymath - and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/kai-bird-and-martin-j-sherwin[^]
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Wow, it's been a long time since I could enjoy a good read, let alone 5 books in a week. And since these are the top 5, it means you must have read even more.
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Forever War - John Haldeman
The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
The Princess Bride - William Goldman The description of the fight scene atop the Cliffs of Insanity is in my opinion the reason the English language was invented Also the description of the fabrication of the six-fingered sword I was fascinated by
Chung Kuo - David Wingrove all six or so volumes give or take
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I just finished re-reading "The Stainless Steel Rat" by Harry Harrison for about the fifth time!
Basically anything by Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Trying to implement LL(k) parsing I've stumbled upon the need to generate viable suffixes without knowing precisely what they are. I've implemented viable prefix generation before, but it's just different enough to confound me.
Google doesn't help much.
And it got me thinking of how many times this happens to me over the course of say, a year, where I end up well off the beaten path, or swimming way out past the markers.
Clearly, I do it to myself, considering how many people go through their careers without encountering problems that are clear out in left field, and when I do, it's usually for my own projects. I must enjoy it.
I also find it frustrating, just because there's nobody around to ask the questions I want to ask, and it makes me wish I had gone to school for some of these things.
Anyway, as often as not, the answers are out there, but what is there is spotty and difficult to understand. I'm a determined plodder though. I will trudge through the muck of it and get the goods.
Edit: Aaaand just writing this led something to click for me. Not sure how much is going to be gained from it, but some of you probably wonder why I write stuff like this here. Part of this is why, and part of it is there's no good forum for writing about things like the way we think about code.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Going to school for something presumes that you know ahead of time that you're going to need it. My guidance counselor said I could be a scientist or an astronaut. What school should I have picked?
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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I knew I'd be a coder by the time I was 8.
Real programmers use butterflies
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... morphs into "omigod"
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Comes with a built in CCC too.
Another variant would be moronic.
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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Well I hope you've had a PCR* since ...
* Personal Computer Revelation
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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