The mini-bio of Gerald Sussman on the right-hand side states that "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs .. is universally acknowledged as one of the top ten textbooks in computer science".
I'm curious why they explicitely speak about the top ten.
This is a misunderstanding. You can read my question as "According to [..] the SICP is one of the top 10 CS books. Which, do you think, are those?"
I'm just interested because it seems SICP is THE book on programming, and I wonder: Which other CS books are that prominent? The only one I can think of, is "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig.
This is probably going to devolve again into a long discussion, but here's the books with an academic bent that I was most impressed with (many of them 25 years ago, of course):
"Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman (a.k.a the "Dragon Book")
"The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth
"Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation" by John E. Hopcroft and Jeffrey D. Ullman
An amazing book, despite the fact that the core thesis of the first edition, that we were on the verge of permanent world domination by RISC architectures, turned out to be dead wrong:
"Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson
Two books by Niklaus Wirth (A bit out of fashion, maybe because they were written in the "wrong" languages, and maybe because they were TOO concise in today's world of shovelware books. Wirth is the Strunk & White of CS writers):
"Algorithms and Data Structures" by Niklaus Wirth
"Compiler Construction" by Niklaus Wirth
This book might be the one that impressed me most in my undergraduate studies, although I can't say I've done much with what I read there:
"Parallel Program Design: A Foundation" by K. Mani Chandy and Jayadev Misra
I'm curious why they explicitely speak about the top ten.
Which are the other 9?