Interesting. After reading Code complete (2nd) I felt that I didn't get much out of Pragmatic programming either.
One question that keeps popping into my mind is what books and in what order should one feed an inexperienced junior to turn them into a mature software engineer.
I don't think there's a curriculum you can set up. For me, the best books were books that talked about problems i was having at the time.
For example, my biggest take away from Code Complete was the stupid slow but easy to test implementation of the excel calculation engine. I was working on a print system at the time, building a stupid system and a fancy system and comparing the results gave me a lot of insight about what was wrong with the fancy system.
Me personally, i got a ton out of the lisp books PAIP, SICP, On Lisp, and even the CL spec. Thinking about something in terms of stream processing or unification from the various prolog implementations would get me started on answers to problems i was facing (they never required unification).
Just blindly handing out reading, i'd probably give people _The Phoenix Project_. Most organizations are a mess, and new programmers don't understand that. The down side is, new programmers can't do much about it. It can help explain why you do some painful stuff though, like on call or code reviews.
One question that keeps popping into my mind is what books and in what order should one feed an inexperienced junior to turn them into a mature software engineer.