This pioneer was my eye opener to programming: it was actually possible to have a sophisticated and elegant communication with a machine instead of just shouting blunt commands! The idea of implementing a language in the language itself is both the perfect explanation and test case for a language. A little drawback is the verbose style of the text: be prepared to read a novel rather than a technical piece.

It is an amazing fact of history that UNIX and C, despite the numerous idiosyncrasies, got it so right already at a time, where ordinary mortals knew computers only from science fictions. And this book is so well-written that it should be put under the pillow of all the "modern" authors that produce rather thick than helpful books. In another fifty years from now on, this text will still be an indispensable companion of system programmers.

Despite a beneficial decade or so of standardizations, there still is no single, universal lingua franca for programmers. But JavaScript will certainly be a serious candidate for the time to come. And this is certainly also due to Douglas Crockford, who has a great talent to distill strong spirit from messy stuff and display it nicely. I can strongly recommend his video lectures. (Unfortunately Douglas' good taste seems to be quite restricted to technical stuff: Chuck Norris is the kick-boxing background of many of his lectures.)