Here are my three: "Unwritten Laws of Engineering" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0791801624 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0791801624 Originally meant for mechanical e

Here are my three: "Unwritten Laws of Engineering" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0791801624 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0791801624 Originally meant for mechanical engineers, it provides specific and general non-technical career advice. It focuses on what we call “soft” skills today. This field puts so much weight into technical prowess that we often think of these “soft” skills as somehow beneath the “hard” skills. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you don’t spend time on learning how to navigate your career, you’ll be as well off as a dragster on the backroads: you’ll get nowhere fast. I only wish I could have read this book sooner; it would’ve saved me a lot of trouble early on. "Becoming a Technical Leader" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0932633021 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0932633021 Don’t let the title fool you: this is not just for people planning on becoming a “Tech Lead.” It’s for anyone in the tech field, period. If you pickup this book you must work through the exercises to get the full effect. It will be worth it. It’ll be like having your own therapist, life coach, and mentor, except that it’s just you and a notebook answering very important questions. "The Pragmatic Programmer" https://www.amazon.com/dp/020161622X https://www.amazon.com/dp/020161622X I consider this book 10x better than Clean Code and Code Complete combined! (Though that may just be because I read PragProg first?) As the name suggests, this book provides more tactics advice but also gives great career advice too. The most famous is to “learn a new language each year.” This kind of advice seems a bit much, but over my career I’ve had to write in over a dozen different languages, even though 90% of the code I’ve written has been in just one language, the ability to pickup new languages quickly and easily is a solid skill to have. And that’s just one particular tip from this book. (These are excerpts from my suggested reads blog post: https://valbaca.com/posts/my-suggested-reads-3cie https://valbaca.com/posts/my-suggested-reads-3cie)