Secret Hacker Bookshelf

This is a good list, but if you're a startup founder you generally only need to know 1% of each of these books. Don't buy them all. If you had to choose 3 books from that list, what would they be?

Great job, Daniel. Thank you.

I am familiar with about half of these and the ones that I know are great. The ones that I don't know are a new opportunity for me.

Nice touch on the front covers. Anyone with a color printer could just print your page and take it to Borders or Barne's & Noble. Looks like an easy way to find stuff on the shelves and read a whole lot of Chapter Ones.

I was a big fan of Seth Godin's blog and books until a few years ago. Now I don't read any of those.

Seth Godin books are good when you starting to read those kinds of books. His blog can inspire a lot when you are new to his style, but after some time you realize that many of the articles in the blog (or the books) do not teach you anything new. They are just rehash of the same ideas over and over. YMMV, but I have a few Seth Godin books I am not able to complete because the books are very low in actual content. Every time I start reading them, I put them down to read some other better book.

So yes, Seth Godin will inspire you initially, but after a while the value in reading the books and the blog seems to be going down.

But then again this may be a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Or this may be the case of me graduating from the Seth Godin school of thought. I don't know.

I think overall it is a good list, one I take issue with is "Head First HTML" I don't know if it is fixed now, but about a year ago, I tried to teach someone using that book as a manual and the first chapter was incomplete, It literally was missing the text so the individual could not continue without me. Which defeated the point of buying a book so that they could do projects and learn while I was not around.

For most of the rest that I have read, they are great books first or second best on their respective subjects. This is one of the better lists I have seen.

We really should have this kind of post 1-2 times a month as this one (books) comes up just a little less frequently than "whose hiring". We should also have one for "tools I use to develop with" I always scrounge out a gem that I did not know about in those tools posts.

I tell you what would be nice Daniel, would be to have these kind of posts and have your blog scrape the post for products people recommend and then add those products to your list, if you could grab their votes you could get a sudo weight to their product recommendation.

I think that Effective Java by Josh Bloch deserves to be added to this list.