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:

Books, Talks, and Essays

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

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: