When it comes to theoretical CS, I use Shai Simonson his course on the theory of computation [1]. I passed my actual university course by not going to the lectures. Not even once! All the same material was covered in Shai his video lectures.
Shai Simonson is awesome (disclaimer: I'm a fan!), so if for whatever reason the above course doesn't work out for you, might I suggest his course? [1] ;-)
For a theoretical CS book, it is readable, with the concepts progressively introduced to the reader. Pretty decent work.
On a lighter note:
All the previous chapters seem to connive to lead the unsuspecting reader to chapters 14 and 15, and then to section 15.7.
"So far we have shown that 3SAT is no harder than Quadratic Equations, Independent Set, Maximum Cut, and Longest Path. [...] It turns out we can reduce all three problems to 3SAT in one fell swoop."
Yeah, yeah. You think we don't know where you're going with this?
This is great! I dropped out of school after my sophomore year, and got an ACM membership and spent a lot of time reading papers from the digital library there.
This is a wonderful resources for me, to see where the blanks in my knowledge of the field are.
The other day I tried reducing the length of a long winded pdf with outline.com It went as well as you'd expect. The site almost broke the link. Hear that HN entrepreneurs? There's an untapped niche for those who can reduce the volume of any technical book by at least 1/3 without losing any info.
Easy. LZW compress it. Comprehensibility suffers a bit, though.
Kidding, but there's a point: If you want to make it 1/3 shorter, and not lose any info, it has to be denser. That won't make it easier to read - probably the opposite, in fact.
