shadowmatter

These are exactly the two books I was going to recommend. Don't Make Me Think is like the K&R of web UX books, and Designing the Obvious is like a nice web 2.0 companion for it.

Also, I'd throw in The Design of Everyday Things -- see http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d.... It was written long before anyone ever thought of web usability; instead, it focuses on the usability of things you interact with daily in real life. Let's just say that you'll never look at teapots or door handles the same way again...

Peter Theil, co-founder of Paypal, would probably disagree. In the book Founders at Work, you'll find that many co-founders of large, valuable companies claim that having another co-founder understand the business side was invaluable. (Note: I'm not trying to stick up for them because I'm a business guy; I'm a coder guy.)

Love Made to Stick and Founders at Work. I haven't read 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, but I'll check it out, thanks.

One excellent marketing book I recently read is Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon (no ref link: http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...). She believes that going tit-for-tat on adding features and augmentations is a losing game that results in every competitor looking like one another. Instead, you should find your strength, and focus on that while resisting to focus on where your product falls short. The book is also very... poetic. She's quite a quotable writer. Good stuff.

Actually, another case: Vladimir Yaroslavskiy recently came up with a dual-pivot quicksort method where the number of swaps is reduced from 1nln(n) to 0.8nln(n). Yes, he's only twiddling the constant factor, but the benchmarks have been promising, with some sorts being reduced to 25% to 50% of their previous running time. Josh Bloch, one of the shepherds of Java, took the time to implement it as the default sorting algorithm in Java 7 (whenever that gets released). More details at: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.core-libs...

How timsort from Python stacks up, I don't know offhand. But that's a different beast instead of an improvement to a fundamental algorithm.

JS: The Good Parts is will be a quick and informative read if you've already done a bit of JS programming. Once you're done with that, the next book I'd read is ppk on Javascript (http://www.amazon.com/ppk-JavaScript-1-Peter-Paul-Koch/dp/03...), as it's the only JS book I've found that talks at length about the BOM (browser object model). Finally, once you're comfortable with writing JS but really only need a library reference, you can pick up JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan, although you can probably do without it if your patience and Google-fu is strong enough.

Hey, lay off man! If Chicago doesn't have to teach multiplication, New York doesn't have to teach grammar, alright?