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In alphabetical order (all of these are non fiction): Closer To The Machine by Ellen Ullman [out of print; may be able to find used] Computer Ethics by Deborah G. Johnson Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter [Pulitzer prize winner] The Programmer's Stone (only available online HERE ) by Alan Carter None of these mentions LabVIEW. None of these includes any algorithms or code snippets. All of them address the deeper rules of the game for software engineering, from why we do what we do, to how to interact with non-engineers, to how to get your mind to think like a computer without losing your humanity. I also recommend that all programmers read Alice in Wonderland and Through The Lookingglass because whether your like the stories or not, there are a LOT of allusions to those texts in computer science literature; those books provide some useful terms and settings that can be used for analogies from time to time (i.e. "the red queen's race", to describe spending large amounts of energy just to maintain the status quo).

First benchmarks indicate a performance improvement especially when using variable register names (500-1000 times better performance), but also when using constant register names (15-20%). When using variable register names you actually only halve performance now compared to a constant name. I wouldn't have believed that possible a few days ago. With v1.1 the two use cases are a world apart, but that's the difference between n and Log(n) search performance right there. Performance on LV 2010 SP1 seems slightly better even than 2009 SP1 (5-10%). Thanks Mads, for pushing me to investigate this in depth . /Steen