I hunger for information.
So should you.
I usually don’t buy a lot of books, and because of Google search and blogs you don’t really need to spend money when you just need a little bit of information in a whole book.
But there are exceptions to that and I’ll write what books I have read and find very important, especially to web companies.
I think there are four or five books that I have bought lately, which I tend to come back to and browse over and over. One book is called “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug. The back says “A common sense approach to web usability”. This is a very interesting and utterly important part of web development. A cool site alone is not going to cut it. People need to understand how to use it (preferably without using too much brain). As the book states it’s not rocket surgery! Most of the points in the book is just common sense but in all the hurry of producing, yet easy to forget. One bad thing though, is that the examples are a bit old.
The other book is called “Programming Collective Intelligence”. I think one of the most important tasks of a modern web site is to utilize the collective intelligence and based on that form, filter and present information. The book covers topics such as Making recommendations, Discovering groups, Search and ranking, Building price models and other really interesting things. In the end of the book it also have recommendations to third-party libraries and math formulas to all the covered topics.
These two books combined, is a killer when it comes to modern information and social websites. You need to make use of the user base as well as making it look good and intuitive!