Ross Anderson's Security Engineering. More than any other title on my bookshelf, it has affected the way I think about any product design process. Things WILL

Ross Anderson's Security Engineering. More than any other title on my bookshelf, it has affected the way I think about any product design process. Things WILL go wrong, sometimes in ways you did not expect. Hence, you had better plan for systems to fail gracefully rather than by going kaboom. (I design handling systems in the low megawatt range - so design failures tend to make themselves painfully and spectacularly evident if given half a chance.) Edit: Oh, and Horowitz & Hill's 'The Art of Electronics.' I've a MSc in electronics, but AoE was the book which bridged the gap between all the theory we were fed in lectures and the nitty-gritty of actually making something which would work. If nothing else, AoE drove home the validity of the old truism 'In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.'