Design Patterns by Gamma et al. would be an example from software architecture. It catalogs a couple of dozen patterns that recur in projects regardless of thei

Design Patterns by Gamma et al. would be an example from software architecture. It catalogs a couple of dozen patterns that recur in projects regardless of their specific domains. Open Source Software Licensing by Rosen is another. It identifies two broad categories of open source licenses and shows how various licenses fit into each. These two books gave me a framework for thinking about large areas that had until I read them been quite confusing. They turn a chaotic jumble of special cases into a simple framework for forming hypotheses and making predictions.