I love books. I’ve done almost all of my learning from books and web pages. So following up on a post by Boris about finding startup books in Vancouver, I wondered what would be the required reading list for a startup (or a Bootup cohort company).
Here’s my tentative list, from personal experience. What else needs included? Is there a great Drupal book?
Business
- Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank – on my TO READ list, the bible of customer development.
- Startup Lessons Learned – 2008-2009 – Eric Ries – I’m not listing blogs on this post, because there’s plenty of resources for that. But I get to cheat and include this book form compendium of Eric’s posts. This material is invaluable, for the detailed discussion of continuous deployment practices and the lean startup business model.
Engineering
- Test Driven Development by Example – Kent Beck: the how-to book for applying test-driven development (a great Extreme Programming technique for rapid reliable code, and very applicable to continuous deployment) and unit tests.
- Refactoring to Patterns – Joshua Kerievsky: if you’re writing a lot of code hopefully you’ve read both Refactoring and Design Patterns, but this book puts the two together and gives you strategies for migrating spaghetti legacy code to nice patterned code.
- Facebook Cookbook – Jay Goldman: this is a great book that covers all aspects of Facebook platform and Connect programming, from ideation and planning to viral marketing and API code samples. The only downside is that the API is constantly changing and portions of this were already out of date when I bought the book last year.
Personal
- Getting Things Done – David Allen: on my TO READ list – sounds like the least gimmicky, most lean and effective way to stay focused on what’s important and cut out your wasted cycles.
- Getting To Yes – Fisher,Ury: how to negotiate effectively in all areas of your life (with employers, investors, spouses, fishmongers) by avoiding positions and addressing underlying interests.
- The Seven Principles for Making a Marriage Work – John Gottman: <preach>Some things are more important than your next round or release. Without strong support at home you can’t succeed, and whether your startup succeeds wildly or flames out, you will have failed if you lose what’s important to you.</preach>
Please, let’s fill this in with more. And then get Chapters or Amazon to sponsor a set for new cohort companies 🙂
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash