What's on my bookshelf:
The Culture Code
Daniel Coyle
Group success depends on psychological safety more than we think, and a teams values and mission help empower individuals to make independant choices that work toward common goals.
The Making of a Manager
Julie Zhuo
Practical stories and advice to apply as an individual contributor making the first time transition to manager.
The Manager's Path
Camille Fournier
Good overview of growth into the management track, starting out as an individual contributor mentoring others, growing into a manager role, and how your job changes as you move up the management track.
Mastering Regular Expressions
Jeffrey E.F. Friedl
Finally, I feel like I understand the great mysteries of Regular Expressions!
The Pragmatic Programmer
Andy Hunt
Practical advice for problem solving, with good analogies relating real world examples to software problems.
Algorithms to Live By
Brian Christian
Stories about how computer algorithms show up in real life, from sorting to caching.
Sprint
Jake Knapp
Excellent 5-day structure on how to test and validate ideas for features. Agile projects are all about being focused on the user and making sure your product will solve a real problem in an effective way.
Don't Make Me Think
Steve Krug
Overview of usability concepts and why they are important. Humans have a limited capacity to absorb information and make decisions, and so we have to design for that.
Practices of an Agile Developer
Venkat Subramaniam
Forming good habbits from the beginning of a project will help ensure things go smoothly and make everyones jobs easier.
The Human Side of Agile
Gil Broza
The hardest part of code is getting people to communicate and collaborate as a team - this book went over great strategies for agile team leaders to help their teams succeed.
Peopleware
Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
This book helped me to realize a lot about the business side of understanding what makes software teams effective and where teams often fail. It also validated (with research + data) that when you interrupt software developers, they are less effective!!
Coders at Work
Peter Seibel
Interesting conversations with brilliant software developers - helped me to feel a little bit less lost, and a little bit more validated with the weird and complicated challenges that software people face.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Steve Krug
Every small team struggles with ACTUALLY doing usability testing and research - and this is a really good how-to guide for how to pull off user testing in real-world small team scenarios with limited resources.
The Amazon Way
John Rossman
We live in a day and age where customers want to help themselves. They will try everything they can to resolve their situation through automated tools before attempting to get in touch with a human. The interfaces we create must provide users the tools that they need to help themselves.
What Would Google Do?
Jeff Jarvis
The Internet enables the most competitive market on earth; thus the price of competition in many industries has been driven down to "Free". Google understands that customers have many choices, and the only way to succeed in this new market is to simply provide the best service available.
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
Jonah Berger
I met Jonah Berger in person when he stopped at the Chapman University WIM Marketing Team to do a quick presentation for our content creation team. One point that stuck with me: People share when they care - content that sparks emotion of some kind goes viral.
Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs understood that the most important thing about technology was for it to get out of the way and help people focus on what really matters. My takeaway from this book is to continually focus on improving the experience for the end-users of apps and websites.
Where Good Ideas Come From
Steven Johnson
Everyone seems to have a "great idea for an app" and everyone wants an innovative work culture. This book explores the environments which have historically led to innovation and breakthroughs, so that we might embrace how good ideas naturally flow.
The Non Designers Design Book
Robin Williams
Four key design principles - Proximity, Alignment, Repetition, Contrast - and the relationship between these items creates meaning and understanding for viewers. Every software developer should read this.
Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman
Design is really all around us, and sometimes the best examples of design are things you didn't think were really designed at all (like doors, or tea kettles). Good insight into how people learn about how things around them work.
Javascript: The Good Parts
Douglas Crockford
Javsacript is a fun and unusual language with plenty of quirks. This book helped Javascript to make slightly more sense.
HTML5 For Web Designers
Jeremy Keith
Simple overview and explanation of various HTML elements, and when and why you should choose to use each.
CSS Mastery
Andy Budd
This helped me to understand things like how CSS selector specificiy is calculated!
Smashing Book #2
smashingmagazine.com
Many folks follow the blog at www.SmashingMagazine.com - but they've also got books! This was one of my earliest web books which covered a lot of general topics.