Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

The computer science textbook that hacker culture calls the Wizard Book, by MIT professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, teaches the fundamentals of programming: recursion, abstraction, modularity and the design and implementation of programming languages. It works in Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, across five chapters that build abstractions with procedures and with data, treat modularity, objects and state, explore metalinguistic abstraction and close with register machines used to implement interpreters and compilers. MIT used it for many years as the text for its introductory course, 6.001, and other schools adopted it as well. A revised edition reworked all of its programs to run in any Scheme implementation meeting the IEEE standard.

Patrick Collison lists it on his online bookshelf. Santiago Basulto, co-founder of rmotr.com, named it as a starting point in the fundamentals for hackers turned business people.