“well-read” for an IT guy?

There was a library newsletter with list of new books acquired. It had books like “25 Stupid Mistakes, Stock Market”and “SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS -The Birbal Way” – so I asked them what is the criteria of selecting books to buy since the library don’t have books like Mythical Man Month, Making Things Happen, Design of Everyday Things etc. They replied promptly (happily surprised) to send a book recommendation and they will consider. I use this reading list as one reference. What would be a good list?


Two quotes:- about winging it without reading the masters of the field

How dare we, then, decide to just wing it? To skip class. To make up history. To imagine that science is a matter of opinion, something optional, a diversion for the leisure classes… How can we work in the marketing tech field, for example, without knowing about David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman and Claude Hopkins? Or Kaushik and Shirky?

in similar lines, about learning the history of your chosen field

Learn all of the history of your chosen field. I always wonder why all crappy bands sound the same but the bands that make it through history (whether you like them or not: the Beatles, U2, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, etc.) have such unique sounds. Part of it is by studying as much as possible the entire history of your chosen field. I keep telling my kids: if they want to learn to sing, or to tap dance, or draw manga comics, or to do anything, use YouTube or whatever to learn everything you can about all the masters in your field over the past 100 years.
Learn all of their styles, learn how to mimic them, learn their styles better than they knew them and what influenced them. Be able to recognize them at a moment’s glance. And only then will you start to develop your own unique style, which you can only then begin to master. Louis Armstrong did this, studying every musician he could, working with every musician he could, blowing on the trumpet every day for 60 of the 70 years of his life. That’s the only way to get good. To be better than the other six billion people on the planet who would like to be as good as you would like to be. How can you compete against that? Only hard work backed by true, sincere passion.

So if you want to say, how can you work in IT without having read so and so – what might that be?