One of the books I finished long ago but never got around to reviewing was The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas (presumably not of Wendy's fame). The book is a language-agnostic best practices book that's written in just the right tone to get its points across (not too jokey and not too dry). It's pretty short, but does a great job at distilling information to the essentials. This, along with Effective Java by Josh Bloch and Refactoring by Martin Fowler, would be a book I'd recommend keeping around to flip through sporadically.