This morning I gave a keynote at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference called “Roaming Free: The Power of Reading Outside Your Field”. Several people asked me to post a list of links to the books I talked about, so here it is.

Books Others Have Read

The first part of the talk gives real examples of non-software books that have been the source of interesting ideas in our field. Here are those books:

• The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• “The Revolutionary Bridges of Robert Maillart” by David Billington (Scientific American, July 2000)
• Engineers of Dreams by Henry Petroski
• To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski
• What Engineers Know and How They Know It by Walter Vincenti
• Definition of the Engineering Method by Billy Vaughn Koen
• The Design of Design by Gordon Glegg (not the one by Fred Brooks, although that one’s great, too)
• Warfighting by the United States Marine Corps
• The Mangle of Practice by Andrew Pickering
• The Buzz About Bees by Jürgen Tautz
• Better by Atul Gawande
• Complications by Atul Gawande
• The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Books, Talks, and Essays

I also mentioned three resources that are (at least partly) about software, but reflect insights gained from other fields:

• Programming with Hand Tools, a talk by Tim Ewald
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt
• “Tacit Knowledge” by Brian Marick

Suggestions for Your Own Reading

I concluded with a challenge to the audience to each read two serious nonfiction books that aren’t about software this year … and to jumpstart that, I provided some suggestions. Here they are:

• Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
• A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder
• Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins
• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
• The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick
• Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
• The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• Farsighted by Steven Johnson
• The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett
• Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett
• Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
• Irons in the Fire by John McPhee
• Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee