the books you use
 

well i have read many programming books in the hope to ready my self if i'm to go to university as a cs major.
but if what you guys are saying is true then programming books are the least of my worries.

so what i wanted to know is can you guys give me a list of books that you use so that i can go out and get them. and study them at home.
and if there is one aspect of a cs major that is most important what would it be. so that i can concentrate on it. such as a perticular topic in math.

Re: the books you use
 

Discrete math! Truth tables, logic, karnaugh maps, canonical sums and products, circuitry diagrams (elementary engineering) ... also CALCULUS!! Precalc, multivariable calc, ..... Calculus, calculus, and more calculus!

Re: the books you use
 

Don't bother studying programming languages as much as programming ALGORITHMS. Concepts such as classes, pointers, linked lists, and ADTs (abstract data types) are very, very important. Don't get caught up in syntax between each language. They're concepts present in most modern day programming languages, and all that's important are concepts really.

Also, algorithms such as searches, sorts, hash tables, trees, etc. Also, time and space efficiency is a key (Big Oh notation)

To get back to math, there's floating point notation, ... adding/multiplying in binary (base 2), hex (base 16), or any base n system