2025 in Books: Software, Business, and Magic

Last updated on September 24, 2026

You Should Probably Read These

I universally recommend these books.

Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

This book convinced me to stop widening my skillset by beginning again, and start doubling down on my strengths. I loved it so much I recommended it to my wife, and she, too, changed

Gene Kim et al., The Phoenix Project.

This book reinvigorated my love for management, which I lost in 2021–2022. I’m still an IC, but I decided to stop refusing management roles. According to some, this is an IT-oriented retelling of the core ideas behind Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. I haven’t read The Goal, but it was mentioned in The Phoenix Project. And like The Goal, The Phoenix Project is fiction. It’s a novel with a protagonist, antagonist, central theme of conflict, satisfying character development, and gripping plot.

Austin Kleon’s trilogy: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going.

These books were cute, full of incredibly quotable passages, and fun to read. I didn’t spend enough time on them, though. A lot of the lessons left my brain like water through a sieve. Since they are so short and enjoyable, I’ll probably re-read them every year or two.

W. Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work

This book is the ideal of edutainment. I have no formal background in computer science, but the author’s writing was so accessible and well-structured that I had no problem following along. It wasn’t a rigorous textbook designed to teach computer science. It was, however, informative and enjoyable.

Read These If You Develop Information Systems

I recommend these, but only if you’re an IT developer.

Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition.

This book lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways of working. I followed it up with the next one in a book club at work.

James Shore et al., The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition.

This book gave me hope that a productive, humanist, productivity-oriented workflow can work in today’s software world. I read it with my teammates in a book club at work, including the software engineers, QA tester, product owners, and UX designer. Unfortunately the rest of my team had little interest in putting it into place where I work.

Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture.

This book was a delightful read. Uncle Bob weaved practical advice together with stories from his past that served both to illustrate his points and to entertain. While I don’t agree with *every* word in the book (e.g. Screaming Architecture), I still recommend it to every Senior+ Software Engineer.

Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software.

Aside from its amazing content, this book has some of the best typesetting I’ve ever seen. I sought out a font that is a match (or near-match) and reverse-engineered the letter spacing, line height, heading font sizes, etc. Its content was great too, but I was glad to have read Vaughn Vernon’s DDDD first.

Vaughn Vernon, Domain-Driven Design Distilled.

This book followed up Shore’s work in our book club at work. Everybody on the team really liked what they read, but nobody felt like they had actionable insights. So the engineers went on to read Vernon’s Implementing DDD, and the non-engineers read Adzic’s IM and Patton’s USM.

Vaughn Vernon, Implementing Domain-Driven Design.

I read this book with a book club at work. While Evans’s work was well-grounded in theory and left a lot of interpretation in the patterns behind DDD, Vernon is a practical, nuts-and-bolts DIY guide to one approach to DDD. Luckily, these tactics resonated with my team and our codebase has seen marked improvements in the past few months. I’m looking forward to our process catching up so we can do more than “DDD Lite.”

Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping.

This book was fun, practical, and completely outside any way I’d ever worked. It also helped me understand exactly why I’ve failed every time I tried to make my own SaaS startup on nights and weekends.

Gojko Adzic, Impact Mapping.

This book was basically a pamphlet. The process seems…good? But since I’m no longer in a role with the influence or authority to recommend product direction, I doubt I’ll get much use out of this for a while.

Kent Beck, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

I learned Smalltalk to read this book. That wasn’t too difficult since the syntax fits on a postcard. Kent Beck brought the ideas in this book to a wider audience in his later book, Implementation Patterns. My used copy of Implementation Patterns arrived damaged, though, so I read Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns first. I’m glad I did. It’s an amazing book, and its recommendations apply to programmers working in any object-oriented language. I recommend it (even over Implementation Patterns) to anybody who would learn a dead language (oops, not dead) just to read a single book.

Kent Beck, Tidy First?.

This book helped me understand the economics of software through a new light. That was important to me, because during the time I spent as a Director of Software Engineering I was not given a budget and asked to manage the department’s expenses.

These Might Be For You

I recommend these, but only if they’re relevant.

Gene Kim and Steve Yegge, Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond

After Steve Yegge dropped by Kerrick’s Wager and left a comment, I reached out offering to be a reviewer for his upcoming book with Gene Kim. My offer was accepted, and I got access to the pre-production copy of the book. I read and thoroughly enjoyed the heck out of it. I wrote extensive feedback: reactions, suggestions, additional thoughts, and more. I haven’t yet read the published version, but I enjoyed the draft so much that I highly recommend it.

Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer’s Path.

This book wants to follow in the footsteps of Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path, but it seemed less specific and useful as a roadmap. Perhaps that’s because of how different “Staff Engineer” is from company to company, at least when compared to the roles covered by Fournier. But it did help me earn my promotion to Staff Engineer, so it was clearly worth reading.

Tamar Rosier, Your Brain’s Not Broken.

This book was the second I read after I got diagnosed with adult ADHD. I appreciated that it helped me de-stigmatize, because I harbored some bummer feelings when I realized no actually I didn’t grow out of it. It also helped me reflect on my habits of action, and see them in a new light. I was surprised to see how much of my anger and frustration in life was a coping mechanism to help me get things done. I’ve had a much calmer life since recognizing that.

Antonio Cangiano, Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition

This book convinced me to start a blog. It was going really well, and then I shrank back from it due to fear of vulnerability. Since I got over those fears and started blogging again, it’s been a lot of fun again. I incorporated what would’ve been tweets into the blog (as “quick posts”) in addition to my longer-form, less-ephemeral content (as “articles”). Writing has been a great way to solidify what I’ve learned and distill my opinions. Heck, I should migrate this comment to my blog.

Dan S. Kennedy, The Ultimate Sales Letter, 4th Edition

This book was effective, useful, and surprisingly fun to read. I read this because I was fascinated by the strange writing style found in long-form landing pages. After a bit of research, I found out they descend from snail-mailed sales letters. I used the techniques found in this book to invite my coworkers to our first book club, and more people attended than I ever expected!

Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren, How to Read a Book

If you just read its title, this book sounds like a joke. A gag gift you’d give to a colleague when you want to insult them. The paperback equivalent to Let Me Google That For You. But no, it’s an incredibly informative book with specific advice on how to change your reading habits for the better. It teaches you how to skim, speed read, and extract as much knowledge from a book as possible in a short amount of time. It teaches you how to read deeply, interact with the text, form strong opinions, and build a theory of the subject matter with and through the author’s words. It even covers a topic called “syncopic reading,” a technique for reading multiple texts on a subject to gain a wider perspective than any one author can give. While I’m not sure I’ll ever agree with the author’s recommendation to mark up your book–I use a dedicated companion notebook per book instead–I highly recommend this book to any serious reader or student.

Alan Weiss, The Consulting Bible, 2nd Edition

My wife is also a software engineer, but she’s a consultant. I wanted some perspective on what that’s like and how to succeed, so I listened to this book. While Alan Weiss’s narration wasn’t the most enjoyable, his writing is amazing. Since reading this book I have a much better perspective on value-based fees, the difference between contracting and consulting, the value of intellectual property (other than software source code and entertainment media), and the value of speaking directly to the economic buyer. If you’re even considering striking out on your own, I recommend reading this book.

Joshua Kerievsky, Joy of Agility: How to Solve Problems and Succeed Sooner

This book is less a how-to guide, and more a series of illuminating stories. Even though it doesn’t match its own subtitle, I highly recommend this book to anybody who is familiar with agile project management. Whether you love it or hate it, the mantras and stories within are likely to enrich your perspective.

Walker Deibel, Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game

I read this book because my wife and I were considering an opportunity to buy a small niche SaaS. While we didn’t end up buying the company, I learned a lot about the nuts-and-bolts of purchasing small businesses to improve and run as a lifestyle business. Since my previous experience with mergers & acquisitions was at a public company that buys software companies for double-digit-millions of dollars, this was an interesting and different perspective.

Ash Maurya, Running Lean, 2nd Edition

The third edition is available, but it didn’t update the prices in the examples and figures, leading to an under-priced picture of what software development costs. At least with the second edition, the reader is likely to use an inflation calculator.

Leticia Portella, A Friendly Guide to Software Development: What You Should Know Without Being a Developer

This book is a very good introduction to computer programming and the development processes around it. It’s even great for people entering the software industry into non-programmer roles. Unfortunately, it suffers from poor editing.

I Don’t Recommend These Books

Tien Tzuo, Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future–and What to Do About It

The idea behind this book has aged incredibly well, but the book itself has aged poorly. Many of the examples throughout the book were flops, or the companies have disappeared or pivoted. Plus, the concepts are no longer novel. Most entrepreneurs understand the value of recurring revenue now. Nearly every industry that can take advantage of subscription pricing has done so (or tried to).

Zack Burt, The Software Engineer’s Guide to Freelance Consulting

This book simply wasn’t very actionable. Plus, some of its advice felt off-the-mark.

Yegor Bugayenko, Elegant Objects

This book is controversial. I was ready for the controversy. I read many of the reviews, and I was ready to be told how wrong I am about everything and how the world is terrible. What I was not ready for was a book full of self-contradicting advice, incorrect mental models about the world, and different illustrations of the way the author has been hurt by Java.

Tom Taulli, AI-Assisted Programming

There are far better resources (including books) on this topic. This book was one of the few I rated one star on Goodreads this year.

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition

This book celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this year. The Anniversary Edition is thirty years old. Programmers and engineering managers consistently recommend it to this day. It’s incredibly quotable, the reason many programmers use the phrases we do: “sharp tools,” “silver bullet,” “second system effect,” and more. Reading this book gives you interesting historical context on software engineering and engineering management. I greatly enjoyed discussing it through that lens in a book club at work.

However, I do not recommend this book outside of that context. It is, first and foremost, a book written to convince software engineering managers to run large-scale software projects in a specific way. If you do this today, your project will fail. We can talk all day about how these ideas were the seeds of some modern practices, or how there are analogies to be drawn, but those are simply veiled admissions that you should not follow the advice as written.

Charles Wheelan, Write for Your Life

The only reason I don’t recommend this book is because there are writing books that are leagues better. In a vacuum, it’s a good book. But I’ll always recommend William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing before this one.

Michael Lopp, The Software Developer’s Career Handbook

This book is written by one of my favorite bloggers, Michael Lopp of Rands in Repose. I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically recommend Rands in Repose to any software engineering tech lead, manager, staff engineer, architect, or director. Sadly, The Software Developer’s Career Handbook doesn’t earn as much high praise from me. I don’t think it’s a bad book, but it’s not one I’d actively promote and recommend.

Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, Ph. D., Adult ADD: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed

This book is short, matter-of-fact, and clear about its subject matter. But since its publication over a decade ago, the understanding of Adult ADHD has changed significantly. I don’t regret reading it, but there are more recent books that I’d recommend to the newly diagnosed first. Plus, a lot of the information in this book is now available from trustworthy online resources (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Not All Reading is Cover-to-Cover

I referenced, perused, or otherwise got value out of these books, but I didn’t “read” them in the traditional cover-to-cover sense.

Martin Fowler, Refactoring, 2nd Edition

Martin Fowler, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 1

Jenifer Tidwell et al., Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, 3rd Edition

Works In Progress

I started reading these books in 2025 and plan to finish them in 2026.

Robert C. Martin, The Clean Coder

This book is a series of gut punches and calls to action that seems likely to forever change how I view my role as a software professional.

Alexander Tarlinder, Developer Testing.

I’m not quite finished with this book, but I’ll be done by the end of the year. It’s been a great overview of automated testing from the perspective of a programmer. It helped refresh my memory on things I knew but forgot. It filled gaps that I had in my baseline knowledge. It corrected things I “knew” but was slightly incorrect about. I now recommend this to any programmer, whether or not they’ve got a habit of testing.

John Viescas, SQL Queries for Mere Mortals, Fourth Edition

If you’ve been reading my blog, you probably know I forgot SQL. I began reading this book to rectify that situation. It’s a thick book and I’ve had a busy December, so I haven’t finished yet. I plan to finish this by my birthday.

Jeff Sutherland et al., A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game

The product owner where I work mentioned he wanted the team to experiment with Scrum. I began researching books on the topic to make a recommendation, and before I knew it I was sixty pages deep into this book. It’s a pattern-based approach to understanding Scrum holistically, from first principles, with more context and advice than The Scrum Guide. I look forward to finishing this early in the new year.

Kent Beck, Test-Driven Development By Example

Shortly after starting this book, I realized I was missing the fundamentals of automated tests. I put this back on the shelf to read Developer Testing. I intend to return to TDD By Example by Valentine’s Day.

Edward Hallowell, M.D. and John Ratey, M.D., Delivered from Distraction

Ironically, I got distracted by another book after the first few chapters.

Diana Montalion, Learning Systems Thinking

I’ve really been enjoying listening to this audiobook ten minutes at a time in the mornings. After I finish, I intend to go back and go through the exercises, as they seem like they’ll be genuinely helpful.

Harry J. Friedman, No Thanks, I’m Just Looking: Sales Techniques for Turning Shoppers into Buyers

My wife is opening a pop-up retail shop, and I’m reading this book to see if its advice seems applicable.

Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Ever since reading Dr. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, I’ve been reading books about emotions from time to time. I haven’t read enough of this one yet to evaluate it.

Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory

This book has been advertised everywhere and stocked in high quantities everywhere books are sold, so it’ll probably end up being pretty good. It certainly has a strong opening!

Finishing Is Hard

I started reading these books in 2025. While I’m not still reading them, I intend to return to them some day.

Eric Reis, The Lean Startup

This book seem to be the very foundation of the ideas, processes, and persuasive arguments that I’m already very familiar with from other sources.

Meilir Page-Jones, What Every Programmer Should Know About Object-Oriented Design

Because this book was supplanted by Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML, I plan to start over with its “second edition.”

John Vorhaus, The Comic Toolbox: How To Be Funny Even If You’re Not

I started reading this book because I thought I wanted to be a comedy magician. As it turned out, I care far more about magic than comedy. I was enjoying the (surprisingly difficult) exercises in the book, but I put it down to focus on other aspects of showmanship and theatricality first. When I’m ready to script my own routines and acts, I’ll probably begin this book again.

David West, Object Thinking

This book was… interesting. The author draws parallels between object-orientation, extreme programming, and ancient philosophy dating back to Plato. After four chapters of philosophy, I stopped reading. Unfortunately, that means I didn’t even get to the part where the author established vocabulary or taught his method, process, and models. I’ll need to be in a contemplative mood before I pick this book back up.

Grady Booch et al., Object-Oriented Analysis & Design With Applications, 3rd Edition

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Part I, which contained the bulk of the instruction about OOA&D. Part II taught me the UML, which I have found incredibly useful. I regret not learning it sooner. I didn’t read Part III, though. Part III takes the reader through some example applications of what was taught earlier in the book. I may come back and finish this some day, but it’s not a high priority.

Noel Rappin, Programming Ruby 3.3 (“The PickAxe”, Fifth Edition)

When I stopped learning Ruby and Rails to focus on C#, .NET, and Blazor instead, I was about halfway through this book. Unlike most folks, I initially learned ruby from David A. Black, not from Dave Thomas. I would still like to finish the PickAxe, but it may not be this edition. The sixth edition, updated for Ruby 4, is already in beta.

Ian Griffiths, Programming C# 12

When I stopped learning C# 12, I was, ironically, about halfway through this book. I certainly hope I’m not forever cursed to start (but not finish) 600+ page language books. Until I stopped, I found the book informative, easy to follow, and very helpful. If I ever need to learn C# again, I’ll definitely use this book (or a later edition).

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, Third Edition

The rest of this book hasn’t been written yet! I read an early draft of part of it as a technical reviewer for Manning.

Shh… It’s a Secret

2025 is the year I rediscovered my love for magic. I spent most of the year learning tricks from DVDs, downloads, and individual sections of books, so I read few books cover-to-cover. However, I built up a magical library–and a magical-adjacent library–in the latter half of the year. I’m looking forward to studying the art, history, theory, and performance of magic.

I’m supposed to pretend these books don’t exist…

You’ve found the section about books for magicians! If you’re a magician, answer this challenge question to see the hidden content.

Who Wrote Tarbell?

Henning Nelms, Magic and Showmanship

This book is the reason I collected a magic library. I loved every moment of this book, from cover to cover. The tricks are superb on their own, and also serve as a great through-line to illustrate the author’s points. If you ever plan to perform magic for anybody other than friends and family, read this book immediately!

Magnus, How to Make a Living as a Professional Magician

This book was solidly okay. It didn’t seem like enough useful information about the business of magic to actually make a go of it. However, it did cover a few relevant topics. I intend to read Jamie D. Grant’s The Approach next year to learn more about the topic.

Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue, The Royal Road to Card Magic

While I haven’t worked through the exercises in this book yet, I have gotten copyright clearance from Project Gutenberg to confirm it’s in the public domain. I have scanned the book, started converting it using the Standard Ebooks toolchain, and even vectorized most of the illustrations.

Juan Tamariz, Mnemonica

Sadly, the specific exercise Juan recommends to memorize his stack did not work for me. I have a very colorful deck of cards to show for it, but only three or four cards are lodged in my brain. I really want to put a memdeck in my toolbelt, but I have to find a better way to learn it.

What About 2026?

This is where you might expect a reading list for me to work through next year, but I can already tell it’ll be a year of adaptation, so I’m keeping my backlog flexible and my reading habits agile.