Made to Stick
I've won several marketing competitions, an elevator pitch contest, and made countless connections with others, using ideas from this book.
Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#22"Lord of the Rings" and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", because seriously... you need to read something fun every once in a while.
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#23Getting Real (37 Signals)
Programming Ruby (Pragmatic Programmers)
Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)
Javascript: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly)
a good text on database design & normalization, performance issues, and SQL
something to teach *nix basics, which I don't have but could have used
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#24Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (for thoughts on competition)
Managing Gigabytes (if you are doing anything related to search)
Writing Solid Code (especially if you are using C/C++)
Most of the research papers that come out of OSDI/SOSP: Dynamo, BigTable, Sawzall, GFS, Chubby, etc
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#25Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
Build to Last by James C. Collins , Jerry I. Porras
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#26O' Reilly's "Dynamic HTML" is probably my most well-used book.
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#27Make friends and influence people -- will help you understand why people react as strange as they do.
I skimmed that book and it all seemed to boil down to "be nice". Am I the only one who finds that ironic?
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#28- Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson - Copywriting (Teach Yourself series), by J. Jonathan Gabay - The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz
Schwartz gave a Google talk on the book:
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#29Wow, surprised nobody mentioned this:
GEB.
Re: Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
#30Code by Charles Petzold is an awesome hacking book. It takes you from flipping a light switch, thru simple circuits up to assembly language. It's beautiful!