Certainly canonical and authoritative. I dropped the fifth star only because this book addresses Computer Graphics, and we all know about Computer Graphics:
"The Real Programmer might compromise his principles and work on something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as we know it. Providing there's enough money in it. There are several Real Programmers building video games at Atari, for example. (But not playing them-- a Real Programmer knows how to beat the machine every time: no challenge in that.) Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because nobody has found a use for Computer Graphics yet. On the other hand, all Computer Graphics is done in Fortran, so there are a fair number of people doing Graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL programs."