Sorry, that was a joke. If I was honest I might say K&R's 2nd edition of "The C Programming Language".

Definitely this one and also Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth.

SICP almost turned me into an unemployable mess.

Fortunately I managed to forget it all and am now happily earning a good living in a subset of Pascal called Go.

Off topic, but I'm curious: Why do you call Go a subset of Pascal? Go seems to me to be rather different, both in spirit (much less restrictive and nanny-like) and in syntax.

Could you explain?