Paul Graham - On Lisp is probably the book which got me interested in programming, esp. Lisp in particular as a school kid. Of course his essays are some of the best ones I've come across in startup/technical space. Julia Evans - has a knack for explaining things clearly Brandur - his technical posts are informative and beautiful to the same degree! Dan Luu - is full with well researched articles on a myriad of topics. Blog | Paul Cavallaro - Another blogger with very good high performance computing articles and writeups about research papers in same areas.