Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?

Which programming books are actively harmful for developers? I'd put the "Gang of Four" Design Patterns book in this category.

> The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

I need to give this a try again. When I originally read it, it was part of a team activity a decade ago and left unmoderated, so it devolved to everyone being at each other's throats by the end of the day.

Is this serious? I'm hard put to imagine anybody who doesn't get paid to do philosophy (or at least have regular access to such a person) getting anything out of this book.

Assuming you already have a fairly well-defined set of values and a personal philosophy, the next most useful genre by far is psychology. It's not even a close contest.

As for self-help/attitude improvement, it's only useless if you don't already know what science suggests are good habits and behaviors. From there, it's the process of integrating those into your life that becomes critical.

Speaking as someone who chronically lacked discipline, which then translated into a lot of mistakes, among the most important things a person can understand is the value of positive habits and behaviors, compounded over a long time period. Habits and behaviors are what drive wellbeing across a variety of different dimensions: diet, exercise, learning, growth, experience, socialization, etc. They are the principal foundation of a happy life, and most people never even come close to appreciating their full importance.

All that said, I'll be the first to admit that the self-help genre is typically more about dopamine hits and quick sales than real results.

I recently read and enjoyed Orlando by Virginia Woolf. It tells the story of an English nobleman who lives for hundreds of years and accumulates a bunch of experiences. To me, its main point is about the fluidity of identity and what it means to age (or not). It's also just a fun and funny centuries-spanning story full of great sentences like these

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights."

I'm not sure it's useful for programmers in particular -- maybe all this stuff about the ad-hoc nature of identity will help you choose what language to learn next or something :)