For software development - I favor books that are about good practices generally rather than books about particular languages which work well as references. I

For software development - I favor books that are about good practices generally rather than books about particular languages which work well as references. I usually recommend: * Code Complete (Steve McConnell) * The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas) * Clean Code and The Clean Coder (Robert Martin) * The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks) * Test-Driven Development By Example (Kent Beck) I also recommend blogs for more bite-sized knowledge. Jeff Atwood's blog at https://blog.codinghorror.com https://blog.codinghorror.com and Joel Spolsky's at https://www.joelonsoftware.com https://www.joelonsoftware.com in particular have been helpful to me.