In my experience, everyone has a series of “go-to books”, items on the shelf that are well-worn and constantly referenced. Here are mine.
Big Picture
- The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
- Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely, by Ian Mitroff and Abraham Silvers
Psychology
- Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, by Andy Clark
- Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini
- The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Phillip Zimbardo
- Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, by Sam Gosling
- Thought Manipulation: The Use and Abuse of Psychological Trickery, by Sapir Handelman
Engineering & Design
- To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, by Henry Petroski
- The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts- from Fork and Pins to Paperclips and Zippers- Came to Be as They Are, by Henry Petroski
- An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering, by Christoper Wickens, John Lee, Yili Liu, and Sallie Gordon-Becker
- The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman
- About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, by Alan Cooper, and Robert Reimann
Statistics & Data Communication
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
- The Grammar of Graphics, by Leland Wilkinson
- Statistics in a Nutshell, by Sarah Boslaugh and Paul Watters