Don't Judge a Book by its Title
While talking over about our favourite books about software during lunch today we realised that the books people thought were particularly good at communicating general principles and concepts often had titles that made them appear limited to extremely specific technologies. None were of the "J2EE in 24 Hours for Complete Morons" variety, but they all had titles that obscured the good aspect of the book and probably made people not want to buy it.
Here's a few we came up with:
- Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck is a classic book on OO design, much of which is applicable to any language, not just Smalltalk.
- Unix Network Programming by W. Richard Stevens et al., is a good introduction to networking and network programming whether you use Unix or not.
- Practical Cryptography by Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier does not really focus on cryptography but instead contains some excellent advice about the design and implementation of software systems.
Do you know of any other books that one could easily be missed by taking the title at face value? Recommend them in the comments, please.