You Owe it to Yourself to be Old-School
Another worthy pursuit: buy all of Brian Kernighan's books, not just The C Programming Language. It is well worth the pain of becoming slightly familiar with Fortran and Pascal to read these little gems.<p>Being familiar with how things work is undoubtedly useful, but I argue if you are an application developer, learning software construction is equally if not more important.<p>See also: Code Complete, Programming Pearls, and C interfaces and implementations.