“Protect me from oil, water, insects and loose bonding, and above all, O Lord, protect me from falling into the hands of a fool.” [Ancient Indian manuscript]
Books You might Want to Read
A list of useful books from my point of view. Try to get the newest edition - I wrote down the ISBN of the copy I possess.
General
Lyle M. Spencer & Signe M. Spencer, Competence at Work, ISBN 0-471-54809-X
Identify good performance and necessary competencies. See Competence at Work.
Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes, ISBN 0-14-015735-2
Negotiating agreement without giving in.
Martin Gardner, aha! Insight, ISBN 0-7167-1017-X
A confounding collection of brain-twisters in six categories - combinatorial, geometric, numerical, logical, procedural, and verbal.
Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking, ISBN 0-06-090325-2
Creativity step by step.
The Chicago Manual of Style, ISBN 0-226-10390-0
Good for any documentation or any other paper you need to present.
Management
Ernst & Young, The Manager’s Handbook, ISBN 0-7474-1149-2
General required principles for managing a company.
L. Kent Lineback, Being the Boss, ISBN 0-87942-212-2
The craft of managing people.
Mathematics
George Pólya, How to Solve It, ISBN 0-691-02356-5
Instructions on stripping away irrelevancies and going straight to the heart of the problem.
Darrel Huff, How to Lie with Statistics, ISBN 0-14-013629-0
A guide through the maze of facts and figures that is designed to make us believe anything.
Computer Science
Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, ISBN 0-201-00650-2
A classic on computer projects - they are more similar to a pregnancy than to a rice field. It does not matter how many people you assign, you should not expect a result before some fix amount of time.
Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls, ISBN 0-201-10331-1
Programming tricks and techniques.
Risk Management
Duncan Martin, Managing Risk in Extreme Environments, ISBN 978-0-7494-4945-2
Epidemic, Wildfire, Terrorism, …, Flood, Earthquake.
Paul Wilmott, Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance, ISBN 978-0-470-05826-8
The most important principles and methods.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, ISBN 978-0-1410-3459-1
Stop trying to predict everything and take advantage of uncertainty.