Bibliomania

Jamie:

Anything You Want

by Derek Sivers

An easy to read, no nonsense narrative account of Derek’s successes and failures during his time creating CD Baby. My favourite quote so far:
“The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do what makes you happy”

Mindfulness in Plain English

by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

If you’re ever interested in learning more about meditation or Buddhism, Henepola Gunaratana is your man. As the preface says, it’s a very simple book written in ordinary language. My favourite quote: “The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.”

James:

The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald Norman

At the moment I am reading The Design of Everyday Things, which is really a crash course in the psychology of interaction. It’s a book with fantastic pedigree, having been refined over the course of two decades and written by Donald Norman of Nielsen Norman Group fame. I would thoroughly recommend it as a must-read for anyone involved in interface or interaction design.

Thinking With Type

by Ellen Lupton

I’ve just finished a seventh or eighth read-through of Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. The book is widely considered to be one of the best introductions to typography in print, and the 2nd edition adds a whole host of new sections and case studies. Again, an absolute must-read.

Phil Howell:

MySQL High Availability

By Charles Bell, Mats Kindahl, Lars Thalmann

This has proven to be a very useful resource in establishing HA MySQL deployments for clients. There are three main topics discussed; various ways of establishing High Availability MySQL deployments, monitoring and disaster recovery of those deployments and finally, applying these techniques in various Cloud environments, with explicit information regarding Amazon’s AWS and deploying MySQL Cluster.

The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering

by Fred Brooks

A renowned collection of essays on software engineering with thoughts on subjects including project estimation, management, documentation, communication and the second-system effect.

Wil Linssen:

Getting Things Done

by David Allen

I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with the book or at least the title. It’s one man’s very good advice for dealing with workload and task management, and it resonates particularly well with the service industry.

Symfony 2 Book

by The Symfony Community

Technically not a book, but then what technically constitutes a book these days anyway. It’s a great introduction to the recently stabilised version 2 PHP framework. There are a lot of really interesting new approaches in the Framework that are covered pretty succinctly herein.

Dracula

by Bram Stoker

Originally because it was free in the iBook shop, but I swiftly got swept up in it. I realise it’s not a technical volume, but you’d be surprised by how many of Van Helsing’s nuggets of wisdom affect some aspect of your professional life. Forget vampire hunter, the man should be a life coach.

Phil Swan:

Information Architecture 3rd Edition

By Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld

This is pretty much essential reading if you’re designing a large scale site. I’ve dipped into this book quite a few times, but I’m making it my mission to read the whole thing from start to finish.

Designing With Data

By Brian Suda

A book about how to do data visualisation right. It contains a great deal of practical advice on designing clear and useful infographics, charts and graphs.

Sam Quayle:

Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style 1920-1965

by Richard Hollis

Not the most conspicuous book you could choose to read on your way in to work but an insightful choice nonetheless. The book provides an almost encyclopedic overview of one of the most influential design movements of the 20th century.

Visual Grammar

by Christian Leborg

A welcomed spot of respite after slogging your way through 45 years of swiss graphic design history. Visual Grammar is a very concise, simple and beautifully presented reference guide that seeks to define and classify the basic elements, patterns, processes and relationships that form our visual language.

We’d love to hear what you have been finding hard to put down recently.