Can you recommend sources that can help build a basic mental model of economics for someone with more of a coding background?
There's an old 1948/52? edition available as a scanned PDF which can give you an idea if you want to buy the updated version: http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Economics_in_one_lesson.pdf.
At a higher level, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek is also short but unlike the above quite dense. Most useful (to me) for applying information theory to command economies. Rather apropos to the situation in the US today, it was published in 1944 and dedicated to "The socialists of all parties". It was intended as a warning to the British socialists of the day who were about to take over and remake their country, warning them of a variety of things, some of which they found out the hard way, plus the demonstrable even back then danger of concentrating so much power at the top (too easy for idiot thugs to take over, e.g. Stalin, "Those who are good at acquiring and exercising discretionary powers in government are usually the most ruthless and corrupt individuals." (Wikipedia)). http://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/0...
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom#External_li... for the Reader's Digest condensed version (Hayek was amazed at how good it was) and there's even a cartoon version that I reviewed and found to be quite good.
After the above two you'll be oriented for a variety of much larger tomes, from the classic The Wealth of Nations to e.g. von Mesis' Human Action.
* Man, Economy, and State by Rothbard
* Road to Serfdom by Hayek
* Capitalism and Freedom by Freedman
* Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Nozick (politics/philosophy, but a great book)
* What has the government done to our money by Rothbard (http://mises.org/money.asp)
"Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life" by David Friedman requires a little more work.
Several previous commentors have recommended Hayek's "Road to Freedom", but I think his last book, "The Fatal Conceit" covers more or less the same ground and is easier to read.
"Software As Capital" by Howard Baetjer, Jr is interesting, but I wish he had discussed open source in it, since his analysis contradicts most open source theories and practice.
A good Engineering Economics text may be useful.
And I second the other commentors who suggested Jane Jacobs's "Economics of Cities" and "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" and O'Rourke's "Eat the Rich", his "On the Wealth of Nations", an analysis of Adam Smith's classic is also worth reading.
A student emails me asking for a summer reading list. Here are ten very different books I like that are fun enough that you would not be embarrassed (well, not too embarrassed) reading them at the beach:
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich
Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates
I'd also recommend a good textbook, if you're a little more serious.
I'm still having trouble understanding some of the macro stuff like foreign currency reserves, printing money, inflation + employment etc.
The Phillips Curve postulated there was an inverse relationship between inflation and employment (e.g. one aspect was that as labor got tight, it cost more to hire people and that lead to inflation). It was utterly destroyed by the stagflation of the '70s where we got both high inflation and unemployement, but it's still the law of the land in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey-Hawkins_Full_Employmen...).
I prefer the explanation that you get inflation by "printing money", but as we and e.g. the Japanease in the last two "lost decades" show, it's not that simple: this is confounded by the velocity of money as the high level concept and at the low level is expressed as the futility of "pushing on a string" (e.g. "dropping money from helicopters" as the current Chairman of the Fed puts it does little good if people are afraid to borrow or lend).
Macroeconomics is a wild blood sport where no one is really sure of their view of The Truth.
From http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/14-452Spring-2007/Syllab... :
Macroeconomics is a rapidly changing field. To get a sense of the geography, you might find it useful to read two surveys (which are already on the verge of obsolescence...):
Blanchard, O. "What Do We Know About Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1375-1410.
Woodford, M. "Revolution and Evolution in Twentieth-Century Macroeconomics." June 1999. Paper presented at Frontiers of the Mind in the Twenty-First Century, U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, June 1999.
For two more recent and more polemical, pieces, you may also want to read:
Chari, V. V. "Modern Macroeconomics in Practice: How Theory is Shaping Policy." Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006): 3-28.
Mankiw, N. G. "The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer." Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006): 29-46.
Jane Jacobs on cities as the economic entities that really matter: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
Peter Drucker: Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
and the classic textbook:
Paul Samuelson: Economics