This is what I’ve been reading for the past 6 months, trying to become a better designer, webapp developer (Javascript and rails), and entrepreneur. I think this list is a good, up-to-date starting point for anyone wanting to expand skills in these areas. Hope it saves you some search time.
Books with a star (*) are recommended; some of the others might be good but are not for everyone. I listed everything I’ve read, even the stuff I didn’t like, in case you were looking into reading the same book and wanted an opinion on it.
Markets/strategy/startups
Difficult thesis to argue — “stop competing, make the competition irrelelevant.” Well that’s just wonderful. But their advice for getting there is sound — they advise making your product strategy divergent (not a “me too”), focused (concentrate on one thing), with a compelling tagline. If you can’t sum your offering up in an interesting, concise phrase, it might not be an interesting offering to begin with. I really liked the case study on Casella wines and their effective strategy of cutting all of the “prestige features” that wines over-deliver on, and instead focusing on making the wine accessible and easy to drink.
Lots of interviews with very notable startup founders. I liked reading about Evan Williams’ journey through the crash; it was very personal, and he gave some great advice at the end of his interview. Joe Kraus’s interview (founder of excite) was great. So is their slogan: “we are unencumbered by reality.” Every startup founder should grab a copy.
Favorite quote is Paul Graham on developing for Windows: “It seemed like this huge steaming turd that was best just avoided.”
Great argument in this book: “management practices that allow companies to be leaders in the mainstream markets are the same practices that cause them to miss opportunities from disruptive technologies.” Gives me some confidence as a little guy.
I wish the thesis was argued for in 90 instead of 270 pages. Concision is the name of the game Christenson.
I found it very encouraging. Most important lesson for me is to always have a clear product definition in mind, and be able to express it succinctly. Contains good advice for doing just that.
Design
Marvelous. The book itself is gorgeous and uses its own advice throughout. It’s like a live tutorial on typography, and it’s refreshingly written.
“Omit needless words” - Krug advises website copy to be short and to the point, and the book reflects that. It’s a gem at only 200 lightweight pages. Favorite chapters: “why users like mindless choices” and “usability as common courtesy.” Recommended for anyone building a web(site|service).
Beautiful book. Has a very intuitive, convincing (for once) and helpful tutorial about starting strictly with markup first and then building a design up from that markup.
Has a cool tip on using a “mood scrapbook” of images to draw inspiration from when you begin new designs. Most designers probably already do this, but I’ve never done it before, and I thought it was a capital idea =) I’m using iphoto to manage scrapbooks of photos/screenshots..
Not sure why there’s so many gratuitous stock photos all over this thing. I swear 1/2 of the pages in it are stock photos.
A few pretty designs, but a lot of this seems dated. I did get some inspiration, but I didn’t think it was worth reading. Doesn’t really teach you anything about CSS. If you really want to see the designs just pull up the website.
A few good Adobe Illustrator tutorials. It’s the prettiest Illustrator book I could find at Borders.
Tale of a startup (Banner Blue software) during the late 80’s and early 90’s, building desktop software. Fun read. My favorite lesson: aim for products that introduce at least an order of magnitude increase in productivity (100 minutes -> 10 minutes).
Technical books (mostly rails/javascript)
Not at all in depth enough; very contrived and uninteresting examples. Worthless (for me) — might be more useful as a very basic introduction to what scripting can do for your webpage if you’re completely new to rich webpages.
Good, spacious and pleasant introduction to Javascript, with just enough depth to be a useful reference. Much lighter and nicer than the rhino book (Flanagan).
Most comprehensive book for rails. So useful.
Succinct tutorials for getting focused tasks done, e.g. putting an authentication token on an RSS feed (making it a “secret url”). Nothing ground breaking, and it’s kind of expensive for what you get, but it will save you a few minutes of thought here and there.
Lively introduction to the Linux kernel that’s easily comprehensible and very entertaining. Robert Love is scary smart.
Good introduction on some of the deeper elements of the ruby language, discussed in the context of rails. Terrible introduction to rails itself; poor index, doesn’t serve well as reference material.
Big honking ruby reference. Every ruby programmer should have it.
A good chapter on “how to build google maps” and another one on “debugging ajax,” but that’s about it. Didn’t think it was worth reading.
Misc
Fast tour through the history of chemistry. Fascinating and well-written. I feel like I suck less at chemistry.
Fun topic, too verbose. Give me the director’s cut.
Loved every page. It’s about getting stuck on a mysterious island… and the castaways are impossibly resourceful in building up a civilization on the island. They build a forge and start producing steel! On an island! Wow, awesome. Motivates me to build things.
Classic from 40’s. Most important lesson for me was to picture myself in the other person’s shoes before I open my mouth to argue.
Possibly my new favorite non-fiction. Everyone who writes English should read it. Learn how to cut the crap from your prose and make it clean and lean. The entire book is a great example of saying more with less.
Lovely. Introduction to building an algebra, and accounting for questionable concepts like infinity. He has a section titled “what’s the point of higher dimensional geometry?” which is what made me buy the book when I saw it. Surprisingly, there is a point, but fractional dimensions might be taking it a bit far 
Bah! Boring. Turned out to be a “tourist’s guide” through ancient Greece with little fact and lots of speculation about “how we relate them“. After 40 pages of nonsense, it just didn’t make the cut.
Very dry, but thankfully terse. I thought his treatment of knowledge by description was awkward and cumbersome. “On intuitive knowledge” was a good chapter. Not sure if I’d read it again.
Hilarious, but needs abridgment. I gave it 200 (of ~1,000) pages and stopped.
Cleverly twisted; recommended if you’re into classics.
Sitting on my desk, waiting to be read:
small giants
Bulletproof web design
The elements of graphic design
Building scalable websites
Javascript: the definitive guide
The substance of style
Intelligence: a very short introduction
Designing interfaces - this is such a beautiful book. If you see it in the bookstore, open its table of contents and gape in wonder.
Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (can’t wait!)
Information architecture - I’ve already started this, and I’m having trouble getting through it. Designing interfaces has a much less verbose chapter on information architecture, and I’d recommend that if you’re just casually reading. It’s less information, but who can spend 200 pages on such a dry subject? Life is short.
The roman empire: a very short introduction
Photoshop CS2 for the web
Tale of two cities
Amusing ourselves to death
That took forever to write. Amazon, you really need to make it easier to link to your books.
