Back to top

Book Recommendations for our new Christmas Gift?

As we're on our year long trip Nikki and I have read a lot of books. We find that without as many friends, family, and normal recreational activities there's a lot more time for touristing but also more time for reading. This has been great. The last 5 months I've read more non-technical books than the past 5 years (seriously).

At that same time - we're fresh out of reading material! I (Greg) will be coming back to the states for a usability work session at the University of Minnesota and then for Drupalcon Boston. It's going to be great.

While I'm home I'll be bringing back books we finished down here (and some wine) and hope to make a big purchase of books to bring back down.

So, what books do you recommend from the last few years? I'm planning to get a few "web2.0" ish books like Handbook of Usability, Don't Make Me Think, Cluetrain Manifesto, and Wisdom of Crowds. I also think that some "prediction market" books are in order, of course.

What makes this a little more interesting is that I'll be purchasing these books for reading on a Amazon Kindle which is a pretty revolutionary device. It's an electronic book reader which has been done before, but the thing that makes this one work to me is that Amazon has the book distribution to provide over 80,000 books for the device. If the book is available only in hardback and Kindle, the Kindle version is generally represents a savings of 50%. Paperbacks vs. Kindle version is a much smaller discount. I won't have my fat little fingers on it for some time (a month) but man am I excited to get it.

So - comments are open - recommend books!

Category: 
People Involved: 
timeline: 

Comments

This looks interesting

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Reputation-Gossip-Privacy-Internet/dp/0300124988/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200378290&sr=8-1

Don't Make Me Wish I'd Thought of That...

"Don't Make Me Think" is a great book. I've been reading it lately and I keep having these "I wish I read this 5 years ago" moments. It has all the stuff you learned the hard way and the stuff you're still trying to learn...

Do get it. And if usable design is an interest, you can take it a step further (and more abstracted) and read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. In many ways, "Don't Make Me Think" is something of an application of the ideas from "Everyday Things" on web sites.

mlsamuelson

Brothers K

If you haven't read "The Brothers K" by David James Duncan, I HIGHLY recommend it. Family, religion, war all wrapped up into an epic, hilarious, tragic and hopeful novel. His other novel "The River Why" greatly affected my life but may not appeal to non-flyfisherman (can't remember if you do). Also, Freakonomics if you haven't read, very interesting...

When are you coming home? I wanted to get together sometime and talk about web development, only thing in it for you would be free Tommy's...

Hope all is well. Hi to BUGgers.

How about this:

How about this: http://robshouse.net/content/beautiful-code-leading-programmers-explain-how-they-think-theory-practice-oreilly