This book is a history of firearms across the world from the 1100s up to the 1700s, from their invention in China to the time when European firearms had become clearly superior. It asks why it was the Europeans who perfected firearms when it was the Chinese who had invented them, and answers this question by looking at how firearms were used throughout the world. Early firearms were restricted to infantry and siege warfare, limiting their use outside of Europe and Japan. Steppe and desert nomads imposed a different style of warfare on the Middle East, India, and China - a style with which firearms were incompatible. By the time that better firearms allowed these regions to turn the tables on the nomads, Japan's self-imposed isolation left Europe with no rival in firearms design, production, or use, with consequences that are still with us today.

This is a new edition of Geoffrey Parker's much-admired illustrated account of how the West, so small and so deficient in natural resources in 1500, had by 1800 come to control over one-third of the world. Parker argues that the rapid development of military practice in the West constituted a 'military revolution' which gave Westerners an insurmountable advantage over the peoples of other continents. This edition incorporates new material, including a substantial 'Afterword' which summarises the debate which developed after the book's first publication.

It might seem completely dated with all its examples written in the now outmoded Pascal programming language (well, unless you are one of those Delphi zealot trying to resist to the Java/.NET dominance), but it is still highly recommended.
It is the single book I learnt most from when I was a freshman studying Computer Science at my local University (when Pascal was already declining, I'm not so old ;-). I wish more recent books were as good as this one, but I have not found a single book so focused and, at the same time, so broad in scope as this one.
Wirth covers programming fundamentals (including recursion), many sorting algorithms, data structures (from simple data collections to B-trees and hashing), and basic compiler technology. That is, four books into one (and, surprisingly, this is not a hefty tome.)

Now available in paperback, this successful radical approach to complex analysis replaces the standard calculational arguments with new geometric ones. With several hundred diagrams, and far fewer prerequisites than usual, this is the first visual intuitive introduction to complex analysis. Although designed for use by undergraduates in mathematics and science, the novelty of the approach will also interest professional mathematicians.