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

blue ocean strategy *

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.

founders at work *

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.”

innovator’s dilemma

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.

art of the start *

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

Thinking with type *

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.

Don’t make me think: a common sense approach to web usability *

“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).

Transcending CSS *

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.

The zen of CSS design

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.

How to wow with illustrator

A few good Adobe Illustrator tutorials. It’s the prettiest Illustrator book I could find at Borders.

Bootstrap

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)

DOM scripting

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.

PPK on javascript *

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).

Agile web development with rails, 2nd edition *

Most comprehensive book for rails. So useful.

Rails recipes *

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.

Linux kernel development *

Lively introduction to the Linux kernel that’s easily comprehensible and very entertaining. Robert Love is scary smart.

Ruby for rails

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.

Programming ruby (pickaxe) *

Big honking ruby reference. Every ruby programmer should have it.

Pragmatic ajax

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

The elements: a very short introduction *

Fast tour through the history of chemistry. Fascinating and well-written. I feel like I suck less at chemistry.

The tipping point

Fun topic, too verbose. Give me the director’s cut.

The mysterious island (Jules Verne) *

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.

How to win friends and influence people *

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.

On writing well **

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.

Mathematics: a very short introduction

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

The classics: a very short introduction

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.

The problems of philosophy (bertrand russell)

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.

Don Quixote

Hilarious, but needs abridgment. I gave it 200 (of ~1,000) pages and stopped.

Oedipus cycle

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.