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Non-technical books for developers and engineers

Why read non-technical books

Besides technical books, it is also important and fun for developers and engineers to read books that are not technical. These are books I have read, or still want to read.

The book list

  • Behind Closed Doors : A newly hired manager, Sam, takes over a struggling software team, and over seven weeks he picks up the basics: one-on-ones, feedback, meetings, hiring and delegating.
  • Being Geek : A career guide for software people, with a lot of humor. It covers interviewing, dealing with managers and meetings, geek personality types, and how to keep growing without losing what you like about the job.
  • Driving Technical Change : You have a better tool or practice, but your colleagues are not convinced. The book describes the typical kinds of skeptics and gives practical tactics to win them over.
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People : A classic on personal effectiveness built on seven habits, such as taking initiative, starting with the end in mind, putting first things first and seeking first to understand. The focus is on character and principles rather than quick tricks.
  • Land the Tech Job You Love : A guide to job hunting in tech. It covers finding the right opportunities, writing a resume, preparing for interviews and negotiating an offer, with attention to finding a job that actually fits you.
  • Making Things Happen : Lessons on shipping projects, drawn from the author’s years at Microsoft. It is about plans, specifications, decisions, politics and leadership, and what it takes to get a project finished.
  • Manage your Project Portfolio : For teams and managers who have too many projects at once. It explains how to rank projects, limit work in progress and say no, so that more projects actually get finished.
  • Masterminds of Programming : Interviews with the creators of well-known programming languages. They talk about design choices, trade-offs and how their languages came to be.
  • Team Geek : About collaboration in software teams, written by two Google engineers. Its central idea is “humility, respect and trust”. It also covers team culture, dealing with difficult people and the first steps into leadership.
  • The Design of Everyday Things : Why doors, stoves and software are often confusing, and how good design avoids that. It introduces concepts like affordances, feedback and mapping, and argues for design centered on humans instead of blaming the user.
  • The Mythical Man-Month : Essays on software project management from the IBM OS/360 era that are still relevant. Best known is Brooks’s law, that adding people to a late project makes it later, along with ideas like conceptual integrity and “no silver bullet”.
  • Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams : The main problems of software projects are social, not technical. The book makes the case for good working conditions, quiet workspaces, team building and trust.
  • Notes to a Software Tech Lead : Practical advice for team leaders on growing a self-organizing team. It covers how to lead, how to organize the team, and how to develop people while still delivering.
  • Getting Things Done : A personal productivity method based on getting everything out of your head into a trusted system. You capture, clarify, organize and review your tasks, and decide on concrete next actions.
  • How to Become a Highly Paid Corporate Programmer : Career advice for programmers in a corporate environment. It covers handling the interview process, getting noticed by your manager, understanding the business side, finding mentors and negotiating your pay.
  • Coders at Work : Interviews with well-known programmers, such as Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson and Peter Norvig. They talk about how they learned to program, how they debug and design, and what they think makes a good programmer.
  • The Google Story : The story of Google’s rise, from two Stanford students with a search idea to a public company. It also covers the culture, the money and the competition along the way.

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