Books tech professionals should read in 2022

We curated books that tech professionals — engineers, marketers, entrepreneurs, designers — will find interesting.

Reading provides you with an opportunity to learn from the journey of the writer. Thereby, creating room for you to avoid their mistakes and also leverage their success strategy to achieve scale as you continue with your journey [for the sake of this article, your career journey].

While they’re several other ways to learn, I believe that unlike podcasts where you can multitask while listening [which means you might miss out on an important detail]; books require your undivided attention.

Each page of a good book has the ability to shape your perception to a more informed one. This listicle contains books for different tech careers including marketers, designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Product and Design

Design for how people think — John Whalen, PhD

In this book, Dr Whalen uncovers critical insights about how customers think to enable the designer to create brilliant designs to match the customer's objectives. John Whalen has a PhD in Cognitive Science with over 20 years of experience in Human-Centered Design.

The design of everyday things — Don Norman

Through this book, Don Norman shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.

The fundamentals of product design — Richard Morris

The fundamentals of product design provide a comprehensive approach to the product design process, covering materials, manufacturing, idea generation, computer-aided design, engineering functions, product types, and market research.

Ruined by design — Mike Monteiro

“Ruined by Design gives us reasons to be both furious and hopeful”, Sacha Judd, Diversity and Inclusion Champion reacts to Mike’s perspective about ethics and activism in design. The book explores how designers destroyed the world and how they can fix it.

Clueless to designer: a beginner's guide to product design — Mitchelle Chibundu

For Mitchelle, “good design is what makes the difference between a product that satisfies people’s needs and one that doesn’t. It’s the difference between a product that forms emotional connections with people and one that doesn’t”. In this book, the Product Designer explores diverse issues along this line including basic skills you need for a product design role.

Growth and Marketing

Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

Oftentimes, people are tired of brands always trying to sell to them and are usually reluctant to grant them broad-ranging marketing permission. To overcome this, Seth Godin in his book proposes that it’s important that companies build trusting relationships with customers.

Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity—time—Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily.

Commyounity — Salem King

In this book, Salem King teaches how you can leverage your unique personality to build trust with your audience.

Building a brand story — Donald Miller

Donald Miller offers insight into brand storytelling with the seven universal elements that makes for powerful stories to teach the reader how to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses. Donald is a New York Times bestselling author.

Growth hacks — Peace Itimi

This book approaches growth hacking from three perspectives — inspiration, Marketing and self-development. Peace covers pricing and brand positioning strategies, product development and marketing penetration strategies and other important areas in growth marketing.

9Ps of branding — Blessing Abeng

Blessing is a marketing and communication expert, in this free ebook, she explores 9 important elements of creating a great brand. Each chapter focuses shares the 9Ps of branding: Purpose, People, Personality, Product, Promise, Promotion, Partnership, Positioning and Perception.

Entrepreneurs

Let’s build a company — Harpreet Grover and Vibhore Goyal

Harpreet Grover and Vibhore Goyal share their journey as entrepreneurs in this book. They both met in the university, and from there the duo went on to quit their jobs to start out a company that they both exited when it became a multi-million dollar brand.

The great CEO within: the tactical guide to building a company — Matt Mochary

Matt Mochary coaches various CEOs in Silicon Valley. Drawing from his experiences, Matt wrote The Great CEO Within to share highly effective leadership and business-operating tools.

The birth of Netflix and the amazing life of an idea — Marc Randolph

Netflix’s co-founder and pioneer CEO, Marc Randolph writes about his journey of how a simple thought to leverage the internet to rent movies became Netflix.

Marc’s book answers the following questions: “How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? How do you deal with success? What even is success?”

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup — John Carreyrou

John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning known for exposing the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in the Wall Street Journal.

In Bad Blood, John gives a deep dive into the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos — one of the biggest corporate frauds in history.

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success — Matthew Syed

According to Matthew, “Black Box Thinking is a new approach to high performance, a means of finding an edge in a complex and fast-changing world. It is not just about sport but has powerful implications for business and politics, as well as for parents and students. In other words, all of us”.

Engineering

Cloud engineering for beginners — Adora Nwodo

In this book, Adora Nwodo creates a foundational understanding for anyone who intends to start a career in cloud engineering by breaking down the concept of cloud computing and helping them through navigating a career in the sector.

At the Microsoft Mixed Reality team, Adora builds cloud services and also create ‘high-value experiences’ related to artificial intelligence and mixed reality.

Also Read: 10 female Nigerian tech professionals

The self-taught programmer: the definitive guide to programming professionally — Cory Althoff

“This book is not just about learning to program; although you will learn to code. If you want to program professionally, it is not enough to learn to code; that is why, in addition to helping you learn to program, I also cover the rest of the things you need to know to program professionally that classes and books don't teach you”, Cory stated.

According to him, “the Self-taught Programmer" is a roadmap, a guide to take you from writing your first Python program to passing your first technical interview

Cracking the coding interview — Gayle Laakmann McDowell

“This book provides 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions: From binary trees to binary search, this list of 150 questions includes the most common and most useful questions in data structures, algorithms, and knowledge-based questions.”

Gayle Laakmann McDowell is the founder and CEO of CareerCup. Her background is in software development. She has worked as a software engineer at Google, Microsoft, and Apple. At Google, she interviewed hundreds of software engineers and evaluated thousands of hiring packets on the hiring committee.

The Pragmatic Programmer — Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

“The Pragmatic Programmer cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process--taking a requirement and producing working, maintainable code that delights its users”.

Andrew Hunt and David Thomas cover topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse.

Have you read any of these books? Tweet at us and let us know how helpful books are to you as a [budding] tech professional.