Tech Business Books

[Dallas Querry]

Technologyis exerting an ever-growing influence on our world. Give the gift of knowledge to enlighten the technology-obsessed people in your life and help them learn more about the companies and characters dominating the industry, the news cycle, and, increasingly, our lives.

From painstakingly researched biographies and histories charting the rise and fall of modern business empires to deep dives into the birth of influential gadgets, these are some of the best tech books to gift. You may also be interested in our Best Cookbooks and Best Kindles guides.

Updated November 2023: We have added several new picks to this guide, including A Trip into the Mirror World, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, and Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games.

A well-deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book should be required reading for anyone who works in technology or harbors a curiosity about how it came to dominate our lives. First published in 1981, the book reveals the inner workings of Data General in the 1970s as the company strives to design and release a successful next-generation minicomputer. Kidder captures the struggle between management and creatives and weaves a fascinating tale from an ostensibly dry subject. He explains the intense time pressure on engineers that led to a constant state of crunch, the need for recruits to feel like they are working on something important they have some stake in, and the psychology of leadership intent on realizing ambitious projects. It is positively prescient about the dangers of burnout for the unsung heroes who sacrifice so much to build new machines.

This fascinating dive down the rabbit hole of Covid conspiracy is ostensibly about how people confuse Naomi Klein with her namesake, Naomi Wolf. Klein is a leftist journalist and climate activist; Wolf was a third-wave feminist but is now a rabid anti-vaxxer.

If you can't help but ponder about artificial intelligence these days, you'll get a kick out of this book. It delves into machine-learning algorithms and their limitations in an accessible, engaging, and often hilarious way.

Dismissed by many as harmless humor, memes have become powerful weapons in the culture wars. This fascinating book digs into the history of memes, examines their adoption by the alt-right and conspiracy theorists, and explains the role memes play in radicalization, misinformation, and even extremism. By distilling complex issues into seductive inside jokes, memes spread through social media, sowing social division and recruiting the disaffected. Well researched and written, this insightful dive into online culture and its impact on modern democracy makes for uncomfortable reading.

For more on bias in tech, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O'Neil, are worth reading.

In 2020 I thought I would find less time to read, due to the missing commute, my main reading time for 2019. This lead me to explicitly take time to read, and actually finish more books than in the year before. And most of them were great books, too! Here's a summary of what I learned from each.

The first book I read about how to get to a working idea was also the best one from my perspective. The main idea is to talk to potential customers to find and validate ideas. It goes into detail how to find customers to talk to, which questions to ask and how to best ask them, how to find an MVP, and how to validate it with minimal effort. From a content perspective it is similar to The Mom Test (see below), but I found it to be a bit more practical.

While the other books in this category are aimed (at least partially) at startups, Loonshots by Safi Bahcall is taking more of a bird's-eye view on the topic of innovation. The main idea from the book is that an organization can only grow to a certain size and remain innovative, because managing a big organization requires a different mindset. It proposes to split your organization in two, one part that is innovative and one that is operational, and tie them together close enough so ideas can permeate.

Play Bigger introduces the idea of category design. Instead of just building a product, you build a new market demand, while at the same time building a product that fulfills the market demand and an organization that builds the product. The idea of doing everything at the same time didn't resonate that well with me, but finding a customer problem and then promoting the problem instead of your own solution is a very powerful tool.

The Mom Test is on the recommended reading list by EF, the program I joined in March 2020. It's basically the same content as Lean Customer Development: Ask your customers what to build, but ask them in a way that does not incentivize them to lie. This is achieved by asking about how they currently do things and extrapolating from there, instead of asking how they would do things in the future.

A modern classic in software development, Domain-Driven Design introduces ideas on how to structure code based on the business domain. There is a lot of very good insights, but for me the strongest idea is the domain language: Things in the code should not be called by technical terms, but by business terms instead. Ideally, the code written on the business logic should be understandable by someone who knows the business, but does not know how to code.

The Clean Coder by Uncle Bob is one of the wider known standards in computer literature. Still, it is the only book in this list that I will not add a link to. The reason for this lie in the person of Robert C. Martin who I do not want to support financially in any way due to sexism and racism (see for example "The Politics" in this article). Unfortunately I only became aware of this after I had already bought this book.

After having read Clean Code (there's a good JavaScript based summary if you haven't read that one and don't want to buy it), this was on my reading list for some time. The main ideas are true, and easily summarized: Be professional and don't let non-coders take code decisions for you. Say no if a manager pushes you to churn out code quickly that you know will break. And rely on good practices like tdd and practice.

Even though I like the ideas mentioned in the book, I currently cannot recommend it for the reasons given above. My goal for this year is to find a book on this topic from a different author that I can recommend.

One of the biggest obstacles I had over the last years when working in an agile way on projects, was adapting state-full applications like databases. Other than a state-less application, these cannot simply be replaced, instead they have to be migrated. This lead me to read Refactoring Databases. I did not fully read it, as it went into detail that I did not yet need, but the general ideas of how to refactor databases still stick with me, especially using views and database procedures to support multiple different interfaces (e. g. table structures) at the same time.

The other obstacle I still face a lot when working agile is the question of how much architecture needs to be defined top-down and how much can develop organically. Building Evolutionary Architectures by Neal Ford applies the idea of test-driven design to architecture, but instead of testing functionality, it introduces the idea of fitness functions to test for the boundary conditions that should come from the architecture, like performance, cost, or coupling. This way, assumptions and reasoning are made transparent, and the CI pipeline can enforce future adherence to these rules, while leaving open the opportunity for developers to evolve the architecture within these bounds.

Another classic in this list, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture unfortunately was quite a dull read for me. Similar to Domain-Driven Design, the stale stench of Java emitted from the book took some getting used to, and that it is more a list of patterns than an interwoven story made it even harder to read. I still think that I learned a lot from it, so I would recommend to at least have a look at the book before dismissing it completely, just be prepared for a tough read.

The last book I read from this category was way more specialized than the others, but also the best of the bunch. In Cyrille Martraire's Living Documentation he poses the question how to transfer knowledge in an organization and which role documentation can play. The main idea is to not separate documentation from code, but instead to bring them as close together as possible, so that it becomes as hard as possible to change one without the other. Some ideas that especially stuck with me:

Basecamp is known for some unconventional management techniques. With Shape Up, they published a free book on their product management philosophy. It revolves around 6 week blocks of time, so called bets, where teams work on their own on topics and find the best solution possible within this limited time. The main idea is to fully commit to an idea for 6 weeks and give full freedom to the team to implement during this time, but to reevaluate priorities without thinking about sunk cost after.

While Shape Up is already almost old, Team Topologies is still the rage in tech organization literature. There are already quite a few blog posts summarizing the book (e. g. this one), but in a sentence, it is about the following ideas: Build teams that can create full customer solutions start to finish on their own and teams that create tools for enabling the first group.

Those who know me (or have read my GitHub profile) know how highly I value transparency and honesty. This book is right up my alley: As a leader, be honest and direct about your feedback to your employees. Be polite, and, more importantly, empathic, but bring out any problems you might encounter as soon as possible, so people actually get a chance to change.

3a8082e126