books.md

Personal Finance

• Consider Your Options - covers stock grants, nonqualified options, incentive stock options and employee stock purchase plans in an easy to understand way.

Personal Security

• The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy: A Privacy Guide for the Rest of Us

Business, Etc

• Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull - Lessons learned at Pixar while trying grow and sustain an incredible and creative culture
• Drive (Daniel Pink) - Carrots & sticks are so last century. For 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.
• The Wealth of Networks - Collaborators and non-market actors (wikipedia, open source) are king in the emerging "industrial information economy"
• The Cluetrain Manifesto - How we think about and approach marketing as a company, TL;DR: "Markets are conversations"
• The Innovator's Dilemma - Why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation.
• The Innovator's Solution - Mentioned as more accessible than Innovator's Dilemma
• The Outliers - The Story of Success - what makes high-achievers different?
• Users, not customers (@benbalter)
• Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations (@benbalter)
• Rework (from @matthewmccullough)
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows (from @matthewmccullough)
• Maverick by Ricardo Semler (from @matthewmccullough, recommended by @tpw)
• The Future of Management by Gary Hamel (from @matthewmccullough)
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (from @matthewmccullough)
• Multipliers - How the best leaders make everyone smarter - by Liz Wiseman (from @tlberglund and implicitly @aitchabee)
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Building a business when there are no easy answers - By Ben Horowitz (@jessla)
• Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard - by Chip and Dan Heath (@elizabethn)
• Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond - A history of the Watson family and how IBM was built - by Thomas J. Watson (@aitchabee)

• Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (from @matthewmccullough)
• Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (from @matthewmccullough)
• Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently (from @matthewmccullough)
• The New Kingmakers (from @matthewmccullough)
• The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking down Barriers (from @matthewmccullough)
• The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections
• If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business
• Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation These people were collaborating, iterating, and shipping the way we do, as far back as the 1930's.
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence A collection of articles about increasing your own emotional intelligence as well as those around you.
• Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products Cross-functional team kick-offs for large-scale projects

Software / Open Source

• Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs
• Mikado Method
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar - The Manifesto of the Open Source Revolution (from @benbalter)
• Producing Open Source Software - Open Source for Dummies (from @benbalter)
• "Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software" by Eric Evans -- also, read the last chapters first
• "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers
• "Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models" by Martin Fowler
• JavaScript: The Good Parts (@jch)
• Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby (@jch)
• Ruby Best Practices (@jch)
• Head First Ruby Decent start.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs -- a classic (@jch)
• Virtualization Essentials (@bitoiu)
• Former Core Application Engineering team reading list
• Git for Humans - A great intro to Git for anybody and everybody
• The Org Mode 8 Reference Manual - Organize your life with GNU Emacs
• Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Predictive Data Analytics: Algorithms, Worked Examples, and Case Studies
• The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction For newbies and greybeards alike, helps you learn from the beginning or fill in gaps in your fundamentals.
• DevOps Troubleshooting: Linux Server Best Practices Great for support folks. You should know what is in this book. Period.
• Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook Good reference, good for filling in gaps in your fundamental knowledge.

Operations

• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
• Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time @technicalpickles
• fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology
• The Art of Capacity Planning [Kindle Edition] Jo @jnewland
• The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder @gorsuch
• Resilience Engineering in Practice
• Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Presentations and Public Speaking

• The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides @technicalpickles
• Confessions of a Public Speaker (from @matthewmccullough)
• Presentation Patterns (Free for Hubbers in our Box folder) (from @matthewmccullough)
• Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte (from @matthewmccullough)
• Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (from @matthewmccullough)
• Advanced Presentations by Design by Andrew Abela (from @matthewmccullough)
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures (from @matthewmccullough)
• Propose, Prepare, Present: How to become a successful, effective, and popular speaker at industry conferences

Self Help / Inspiration

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience This book is a distilled, readable (i.e. non-jargony) summary of lots of research into flow states. Spoiler alert: being in a flow state makes you happy.
• Delivered From Distraction - if you've ever wondered whether you have ADHD, this is the book for you. Protip: highlight everything that sounds familiar.
• Being Geek - there's much more to being a geek than dealing with code. (from @benbalter)
• Hackers - The history of the hands-on need to take something apart, figure out how it works, share that information, and build something better. (from @benbalter)
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie - Classic book on how to work with and treat other human beings. A must read.
• "Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)" by M.K. Gandhi (@rick)
• My Experiments with Truth (@rick)
• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (@chrishunt, @jch)
• Remote - Office not required by David Heinemeier Hansson - Provides some guidance to hubbers starting their remote journey (@bitoiu)
• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
• Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (@francisfuzz)
• Mastery (@francisfuzz)
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
• Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World Besides just encouraging you to stand and walk more, has some great mobility exercises for helping with tight muscles and joints.
• Lose the Booze: the no meetings guide to clearing up your drinking problem for good Really good advice, but I'm not sure if it works yet.
• Lean In: Women, Work and the Will the Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (@mendyslaton) This is a must read for ambitious women in tech around achieving success, balancing career and family, and encouraging other women.
• Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Rick Hanson How to retrain your brain to be happier, based on neuroscience -- see his Ted Talk.
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell A book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem.
• Who's Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success--and Won't Let You Fail by Keith Ferrazzi A guide on creating an inner circle of “lifeline relationships” – deep, close relationships with a few key trusted individuals who will offer the encouragement, feedback, and generous mutual support every one of us needs to reach our full potential. (@that-pat)
• Unwind!: 7 Principles for a Stress-Free Life by Michael Olpin A book about optimizing your body, heart, mind, and soul, recognizing that any and all of these dimensions of your life affect your anxiety level.
• The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life by Dr. Robin Stern

Communication

• What Did You Say? The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback by Charles N Seashore (from @rsanheim)
• Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg (from @jnewland)
• Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (BK Business) (from @matthewmccullough)
• The Elements of Style -- explains common writing mistakes, and how to communicate clearly in writing (@jch)
• Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson et al - this book will change all of your relationships for the better.

Meditation

• "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Ven. Henepola Gunaratana, (PDF) (@rick)
• "Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention" by Ken McCleod
• "Peace is Every Step" by Thich Nhat Hanh
• "The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living" by the Dalai Lama
• See also: github/meditation
• Meditations from the Mat

Design / Creation / Making

• "The Nature of Order" by Christopher Alexander (@rick)
• "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things" by William McDonough (@rick)
• A New Theory of Urban Design (@rick)
• The Timeless Way of Building (@rick)
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (@rick)
• The Design of Everyday Things (@jglovier)
• Lean UX (@jglovier)
• Don't Make Me Think (@jglovier)
• Shady Characters
• Elements of Typography
• About Face (@pifafu)
• White (@pifafu)
• Designing Design (@pifafu)
• Interaction of color

Food, Drink, Booze, etc.

• The Art of Fermentation - Sandor Katz wrote the previous great book on fermentation, "Wild Fermentation", which now seems like a shoddy rough draft compared to this encyclopedic, yet engaging, bible and, er, "cookbook" of all things fermented. 💯 Amazing. (@rick)
• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart - Histories of the plants that are used in alcohol. Warning, will make you want to start a garden. (@otehrcasey)
• On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee - This glorious tome of food knowledge is why I know so much about Brassica oleracea. (@jonahberquist)

Math and Science

• A Brief History of Mankind - on the evolution of human society; utterly mythbusting; outrageously smart and controvertial; fast paced.
• Information: A Very Short Introduction (from @matthewmccullough)
• The Elegant Universe
• The Fabric of the Cosmos
• Seven Brief Lessons in Physics

Economics

• Naked Economics - Short and unbelievably readable introduction to macroeconomic principles. If you want to have a real understanding of things like the Federal Reserve, inflation, pegging currencies, etc - this is a fantastic way to wrap your head around economics.

Probability modeling

• Bruce Hardie’s Key References — become a quant today! The works may appear daunting at first but perseverance and practice pays.

General Intellectual Interest

• Amusing Ourselves to Death - Ostensibly a critique of television and its effects on public discourse, the book also argues that content is often subject to medium. Accessible, current, and good for all humans to read.
• Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape our Man-made World (@freakingid) A fascinating read that will make you appreciate and wonder at the world around you. Easy to read even just a paragraph at a time and not get lost.
• Originals: How non-conformists Move the World Fascinating look into why non-conformists can make things happen. Great case studies.

Fiction

• Invisible Man - Not the HG Wells Sci-Fi. The quintessential Harlem renaissance coming of age novel. You likely were supposed to read it in high school, but didn't.
• 1Q84
• A Song of Fire and Ice - Of HBO's Game of Thrones fame. Marathon reads; the longest is 1500 pages. But, an extremely active story that runs quickly. (from @aspires. Note: IMHO you can watch Season 1 and skip the first book. Others disagree.) (Suggestion: Read #4 & #5 in Feast Dance order.)
• The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks. (@jdmaturen)
• The Martian - A NASA astronaut is abandoned on Mars. Think Bear Grylls in a spacesuit. Technical, fascinating, and pretty damn funny. (from @jasonlong)
• Ready Player One - Snow Crash + a metric 💩ton of 80s pop culture references. (from @jasonlong)
• Magic 2.0 Series - If you enjoyed Ready Player One, you might enjoy this little gem of a 3-part series as well. (from @jodidelman)
• The Alchemist (@francisfuzz)
• Light by M. John Harrison (@acyphus)
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
• Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson
• Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold - character-driven military space series, lighthearted but oh so real. Talk to me if you want more convincing.

Great Books

• St. John’s College Reading List the core philosophical, literary, mathematical, scientific and religious works of the Western canon. See also: How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler.

Game Theory

Distilled from a Gist:

• The Art of Strategy by Avinash K. Dixit (from @matthewmccullough)
• Co-Opetition by Barry J. Nalebuff and Adam M. Brandenburger (from @matthewmccullough)
• The Evolution of Cooperation (from @matthewmccullough)

Other Ideas

• Derek Sivers (cdbaby founder, internet dude) keeps a list of books that he's read with brief reviews.
• @rick sometimes maintains a dem books Gist with reading recommendations in it.
• Personal MBA has a list of 99 books for, well, getting your own personal MBA without going to college. Quite a few of them are already present in this list, feel free to check the rest!

@matthewmccullough what prompted the in depth research?