Books I've Read

Here is a selection of non-fiction books I found interesting, compiled from my Goodreads export and enriched with the Google Books API.

Note that the exported dates reflect when I shelfed the book in Goodreads, not when I finished it. I’ve corrected many but may have missed a few.

Mono titles are programming-related books. Highlighted ones I highly recommend. ☆ Great reads. ★ Outstanding.

2025 (19 books)

• Stand The F*ck Out by Louis Grenier
• Modern LaTeX by Matt Kline
• Gentling the Bull by Irmgard Schloegl
• Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson
• Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
• Connect by David L. Bradford and Carole Robin
• The Socratic Method by Ward Farnsworth
• The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy by Tom Monahan
• Simply Said by Jay Sullivan
• Soul without Shame by Byron Brown
• Inner Work by Robert A. Johnson
• The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron
• Bending Reality by Victoria Song
• Spark for the Fire by Ian Wharton
• That One Should Disdain Hardships by Musonius Rufus
• How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself by Matt Hackett
• Under Saturn's Shadow by James Hollis
• Programming in Lua by Roberto Ierusalimschy

2024 (80 books)

• Don't Send a Resume by Jeffrey J. Fox
• Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
• Rust Brain Teasers by Herbert Wolverson
• How to Live an Extraordinary Life by Anthony Pompliano
• Writing for Developers by Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop
• Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler
• Implementing Lean Software Development by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp and Mark Reiter
• The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long
• Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Grant Halvorson
• The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld
• Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
• This Is Strategy by Seth Godin
• CSS in Depth by Keith Grant
• Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
• Tiny CSS Projects by Martine Dowden and Michael Gearon
• The Five Love Languages by Gary D. Chapman
• American Kingpin by Nick Bilton
• Never Enough by Andrew Wilkinson
• Full Stack Web Development with Remix by Andre Landgraf
• The First Minute by Chris Fenning
• Understanding Distributed Systems by Roberto Vitillo
• Cashvertising by Drew Eric Whitman
• RabbitMQ in Action by Jason Williams
• Scalability Rules by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher
• The Idea Writers by Teressa Iezzi
• The Secret of Selling Anything by Harry Browne
• Gap Selling by Keenan
• Organizing Genius by Warren G. Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman
• The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky
• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger Von Oech
• Get It Done by Ayelet Fishbach
• Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky
• Wordcraft by Jack Hart
• Against Empathy by Paul Bloom
• Herding Tigers by Todd Henry
• One Plus One Equals Three by Dave Trott
• The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry
• Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
• The Catalyst by Jonah Berger
• The Power of Fun by Catherine Price
• Master of Change by Brad Stulberg
• Procrastination by Fuschia M. Sirois
• Wanting by Luke Burgis
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
• Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith
• The Crux by Richard Rumelt
• The Art & Business of Ghostwriting by Nicolas Cole
• Get Better at Anything by Scott H. Young
• Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim
• Lean Marketing by Allan Dib
• Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda
• Insanely Simple by Ken Segall
• The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo
• Dive Into Systems by Suzanne J. Matthews, Tia Newhall and Kevin C. Webb
• Think Faster, Talk Smarter by Matt Abrahams
• How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert
• First You Write a Sentence. by Joe Moran
• Write to Sell by Andy Maslen
• Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg
• Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee
• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
• Magic Words by Jonah Berger
• Think Wrong by John Bielenberg, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mike Burn and Greg Galle
• Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
• Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
• The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins
• Cloud Native Go by Matthew A. Titmus
• Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal
• The Practice of Programming by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
• Tidy First? by Kent Beck
• What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
• The Art of Taking Action by Gregg Krech
• A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie A. Nardi

2023 (58 books)

• Build the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks
• Chatter by Ethan Kross
• Hidden Potential by Adam Grant
• The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
• Staff Engineer by Will Larson
• Hypermedia Systems by Carson Gross
• Beyond Effective Go by Corey S. Scott
• Practical SQL by Anthony DeBarros
• 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them by Teiva Harsanyi
• The Software Engineer's Guidebook by Gergely Orosz
• Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink
• Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
• A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
• The Status Game by Will Storr
• The Anthology of Balaji by Eric Jorgenson and Balaji Srinivasan
• How to Change by Katy Milkman
• Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish
• Work Clean by Dan Charnas
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott
• The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
• Quit by Annie Duke
• The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Klemp
• The Song of Significance by Seth Godin
• Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
• Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen P. Anderson
• Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson
• Slack by Tom DeMarco
• Kanban by David J. Anderson
• The Power of Character Strengths by Ryan M. Niemiec and Robert McGrath
• Concurrency in Go by Ada Notrex
• The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile
• The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
• Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
• How to Decide by Annie Duke
• Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
• The Tao of Coaching by Max Landsberg
• 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer
• Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
• Your Future Self by Hal Hershfield
• Calm Technology by Amber Case
• Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
• 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy
• TomorrowMind by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman
• Snow Leopard by Nicolas Cole, Christopher Lochhead and Eddie Yoon
• How to Speak Machine by John Maeda
• Copywrong to Copywriter by Tait Ischia
• High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard
• Go in Action by Brian Ketelsen, Erik St. Martin and William Kennedy
• Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff
• Mastering Go by Mihalis Tsoukalos
• Daily Rituals by Mason Currey
• The Second Book of the Tao by Stephen Mitchell
• Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
• The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté

2022 (87 books)

• The Functional Art by Alberto Cairo
• Nicely Said by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee
• The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
• Zag by Marty Neumeier
• Copywriting by Gyles Lingwood and Mark Shaw
• Creative Doing by Herbert Lui
• Design Unbound: Volume 1 by Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
• Editing by Design by Jan V. White and Alex W. White
• Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie
• Invent and Wander by Jeff Bezos and Walter Isaacson
• Scorecard Marketing by Daniel Priestley
• Writing that Works by Kenneth Roman
• The Unpublished David Ogilvy by David Ogilvy
• Transcend by Scott Barry Kaufman
• The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris
• The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky
• Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
• The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
• Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Julie Smith
• Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson
• Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan
• Freemium Economics by Eric Benjamin Seufert
• Positive Psychology by Rona Hart
• Solving the Procrastination Puzzle by Timothy A. Pychyl
• Writing Without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff
• Be Your Future Self Now by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
• On Revision by William Germano
• Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be by Steven Pressfield
• The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
• Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
• The Big Score by Michael S. Malone
• 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People by Susan Weinschenk
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier
• Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
• The HeART of Laser-Focused Coaching by Marion Franklin
• Co-Active Coaching by Henry Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandahl and Laura Whitworth
• Developing Coaching Skills by Dietmar Sternad
• The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
• Masters of Doom by David Kushner
• The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
• Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez
• Designing for Behavior Change by Stephen Wendel
• Using SQLite by Jay A. Kreibich
• Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore
• Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen
• Designing Interface Animation by Val Head
• Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff
• The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner
• Product-Led SEO by Eli Schwartz
• Build by Tony Fadell
• Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
• The Arts of PostgreSQL by Dimitri Fontaine
• Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
• How to Write Copy That Sells by Ray Edwards
• Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Drive by Daniel H. Pink
• Breakthrough Copywriting by David Garfinkel
• Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
• The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton
• Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards
• Creativity by John Cleese
• Alchemy by Rory Sutherland
• $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
• Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort
• A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters by Dan B Nelken
• The Copywriter's Toolkit by Margo Berman
• This Is Marketing by Seth Godin
• Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts by Ian Horrocks
• The Dip by Seth Godin
• Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson
• Sketching User Experiences by William Buxton
• Personal Socrates by Marc Champagne
• The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald G. Reinertsen
• Happier, No Matter What by Tal Ben-Shahar
• SQL Pocket Guide by Jonathan Gennick
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier
• Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
• Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
• Stop Asking Questions by Andrew Warner
• The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building by Matt Mochary
• The Jobs To Be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach
• Happy by Derren Brown
• It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
• The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

2021 (60 books)

• The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
• The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero
• Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky
• The Gap and The Gain by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan
• The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia
• Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy
• Designing User Interfaces by Dario Calonaci
• 101 Things I Learned in Business School by Preis Michael W Frederick Matthew
• Move Fast by Jeff Meyerson
• Better Web Typography for a Better Web by Matej Latin
• 101 Things I Learned in Advertising School by Tracy Arrington and Matthew Frederick
• 101 Things I Learned in Product Design School by Sung Jang, Martin Thaler and Matthew Frederick
• Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet
• Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
• The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
• Kanban in Action by Joakim Sunden and Marcus Hammarberg
• Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
• Making Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis
• Running Lean by Ash Maurya
• Scrumban by Corey Ladas
• On Writing by Stephen King
• The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen
• The Courage to Be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
• The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
• What Great Storytellers Know by Bernadette Jiwa
• Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel
• Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry
• The Referral Engine by John Jantsch
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll
• A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young
• Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl
• Hacking Growth by Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis
• Inspired by Marty Cagan
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson and Naval Ravikant
• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Traction by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg
• Junior by Thomas Kemeny
• Hello, Startup by Yevgeniy Brikman
• Contagious by Jonah Berger
• The Copywriter's Handbook by Robert W. Bly
• The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg
• Debt by David Graeber
• Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal
• 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
• Indistractable by Nir Eyal
• The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• Personality Isn't Permanent by Benjamin Hardy
• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman
• Creative Confidence by David Kelley and Tom Kelley
• How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley
• Just Listen by Mark Goulston
• The Art and Business of Online Writing by Nicolas Cole
• Where Good Ideas Come from by Steven Johnson
• Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

2020 (46 books)

• Sprint by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
• Atomic design by Brad Frost
• Grit by Angela Duckworth
• Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller and Dr. J.J. Peterson
• Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
• How We Change by Dr Ross Ellenhorn
• Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
• Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger
• The Minto Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto
• The Choice by Edith Eva Eger and Esmé Schwall Weigand
• Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins
• A Philosophy of Software Design by John K. Ousterhout
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• The Moment of Lift by Melinda French Gates
• Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
• Ultralearning by Scott H. Young
• The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone
• Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister
• Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
• So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport
• The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
• The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda and Alan Smith
• Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo
• Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
• The One Thing by Gary Keller
• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant
• The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal
• Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
• Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins
• How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
• Range by David Epstein
• Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday
• The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker
• Conscious by Annaka Harris
• Effective Java by Joshua Bloch
• Keep Going by Austin Kleon
• Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
• The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life by Boyd Varty

2019 and before (81 books)

• Linchpin by Seth Godin
• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
• The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin
• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
• A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
• A Guide to the Good Life by William B Irvine
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Building Microservices by Sam Newman
• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
• Business Model You by Timothy Clark, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
• Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez
• Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
• Discourses and Selected Writings by Epictetus
• Effective Python by Brett Slatkin
• Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
• Essentialism by Greg McKeown
• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho
• Getting Past No by William Ury
• Good Prose by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce
• Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham
• High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
• Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
• Long Story Short by Margot Leitman
• Managing Oneself by Peter Ferdinand Drucker
• Mastery by Robert Greene
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Naked, Drunk, and Writing by Adair Lara
• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
• On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored by Adam Phillips
• On the Move by Oliver Sacks
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer Ph.D.
• Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
• Pivot by Jenny Blake
• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz
• Principles by Ray Dalio
• Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone
• Quiet by Susan Cain
• Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
• River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
• Socrates by Paul Johnson
• Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman
• The 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• The Art of Strategy by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff
• The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick M. Lencioni
• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
• The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Alan Donovan
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
• The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver W. Sacks
• The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz
• The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
• The Road to Character by David Brooks
• The Rust Programming Language by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols
• The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison and Craig Walsh
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
• Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• This Is It by Alan Watts
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
• Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
• Maxims by François de La Rochefoucauld
• Zero to One by Thiel Peter Thiel
• Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
• Test-driven Development by Kent Beck