Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I lent “Peopleware” [affiliate link] to a friend at some point but never got it back. I supposed they valued it as much as I do. I should probably buy the newer edition at some point.

I’m not sure if this book was the epiphany or it just happened around the same time, but at worst it was a major influence. The epiphany was that the really hard challenges in computer science were not the technical ones but the ones around people. It doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to work on technical problems or solve them. But the challenges organising and getting people to communicate and work together effectively and build the right thing (rather than the interesting thing that we want to build) are also important, possibly more important.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Sadly, another one of those “what happened to the author” books. As much as I don’t want to be a gatekeeper, Dawkins might well have been better sticking to evolution rather than branch out into religion and trans issues (the former in which he’s forthright but not original and the latter where he’s just wrong).

But whatever happened since, “The Selfish Gene” [affiliate link] itself is a classic. It’s where the word “meme” came from, and memes are everywhere these days! It’s well written and makes a difficult subject understandable. It refined my thinking about evolution, the scientific process and science writing in general.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

The concept is right there in the title: Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Is it possible to use a machine gun to create a jet pack? How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge from London to New York? How high can a human throw things?

In that sense, “What if?” [affiliate link] is another one of those “backwards” choices. The book itself is only ten years old but I think my love of taking absurd questions seriously goes back much further. I do it often when my kids ask silly questions, but Munroe is able to do it with a lot more scientific and mathematical rigour. I love the concept, and it’s executed pretty much perfectly.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I was an atheist long before the four horsemen arrived on the scene in the mid-2000s. Their writing did clarify my thinking and made me consider aspects that I’d not come across before. Like How to be a Liberal, it also gave me names for concepts that I had previously been aware of.

I probably could have put any of the Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens or Dennett [affiliate links] books in the list, but there’s something about Hitchens takes-no-prisoners writing that pipped the others to the post here. (I found Dennett’s a little disappointing, to be honest. Probably a good thing I never did philosophy at university.)

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Sometimes confused with the also excellent Programming Pearls, Programming Perl [affiliate link] is quite different. It’s big and well written and well structured. But a lot of books meet those criteria, so in what sense did it have an impact on me?

It’s a technical book that proves that you don’t need to be dry and boring to get the message across. Being “professional” doesn’t mean being humourless.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

It’s a slow-burner of a book [affiliate link]. Everyone said how great it was. It took me a while to read and I thought it was a bit meh.

But over time its impact seeps in. You notice the rings on your hob, the hints about which way a door opens (often incorrectly), forcing function on ATMs.

After a while you realise you’re noticing these things because you read the book. Maybe it wasn’t so meh after all.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Like Accidental Empires, this is one of those books that people in the software industry probably should read but mostly don’t. Maybe knowing the history and the characters that got us to our current state may not make a big difference day-to-day, but I think it allows us to appreciate what we have, or at least understand some of the starting conditions.

For instance, we take the idea of free software for granted these days, but it wasn’t always that way. (But maybe rms always was that way. Society turned a blind eye to a lot of questionable behaviour over the years, and the software industry is no different. When you read about the good work he did, you might also want to read up on some of his more recent writings to get a more rounded picture.)

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

The rule is no reviews or justification, but I did for this book [affiliate link]. It’s such a recent one that it can’t possibly have influenced me, and that’s true. However, I included it because it gives a name to things that I’ve long believed or understood. It’s nice to realise you have a “belief system” rather than just a random collection of thoughts and opinions.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I almost didn’t include this since I inadvertently created a new “one book per author” rule. (I did resist adding Dirk Gently.)

This book [affiliate link[ is about Douglas Adams adventures visiting some of the most endangered creatures on the planet. Not the most endangered necessarily, but it includes a nice cross-section, including the cute and the scary.

This was Adams’ induction into nature conservations — something that he took seriously in later life — and you can feel his enthusiasm. The passion is (almost) catching.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

In many ways, this choice [affiliate link] represents travel writing in general. Theroux has written a lot of books that could fit the bill. The reason I include this one is that, towards the end, there’s a very much warts-and-all description of his return journey. He’s bored and hungry and homesick. Many writers would have skipped this part, or at least glossed over the worst parts, but travel isn’t all glamour. Its inclusion here is what makes it a classic.