The essential reading list

One can spend a lifetime reading only a certain number of books. This list is to keep that reading focussed. The idea is taken from many engineering focussed reading lists, but I have added a bunch of books by myself too.

I will continue to update the list, both in terms of things left to read and the things I have read already.

• How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, Eric S. Raymond
• The Curse of the Gifted Programmer, Eric S. Raymond to Torvalds, 2000
• On Bike Shedding, Poul Hennink-Kamp, FreeBSD list, 1999
• No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks (paper)
• How to become a Hacker, Eric S. Raymond
• HBR Guide to Managing up and Across
• Suddenly in Charge: Managing Up, Managing Down, Succeeding All Around by Matuson, Roberta Chinsky
• Principles, Ray Dahlio
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
• Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time
• The Three Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
• Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
• Inspired, Marty Cagan
• Powerful, Patty McCord
• Thinking - Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
• Zero to One, Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
• The Hard thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
• Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove
• High Output Management, Andy Grove
• Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug
• The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
• The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks
• The Four Steps to Epiphany, Steve Blank
• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
• The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt
• Masters of Doom, David Kushner
• Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham
• Lean Software Development, Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
• The Principles of Product Development Flow, Donald G. Reinertsen
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Kent Beck
• What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful!

Designers

• 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, Susan Weinschenk
• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel

Developers

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson and Sussman
• Clean Code, Robert C. Martin
• Release It!, Michael T. Nygard
• Domain Driven Design, Eric J. Evans
• The Pragmatic Programmer, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
• Refactoring, Martin Fowler
• TDD: By Example, Kent Beck
• Code Complete, Steve McConnell
• Managing Humans, Michael Lopp
• Out of the Tar Pit, Ben Mosely, Peter Marks (paper)
• On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules, David L. Parnas (paper)
• Brewer’s conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services, Seth Gilbert, Nancy Lynch (paper)
• Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, Roy Fielding (thesis)
• The Way of Testivus, Alberto Savoia (humour)

Extended Canon:

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim N. Taleb
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: The Complete Trilogy in Five Parts (Hitchhikers Guide to/Galaxy)
• Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson Albom, Mitch