I really enjoy giving recommendations to those who are operating in the Software Engineering world to take inspiration from non tech areas as well.

In the bellow lists, you will find books that I have read and that I consider to be of great value from more than just the tech world.

For those who love to code

Language Agnostic

• Code Complete by Steve McConnell

• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler

• Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres

• Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell

• Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck

• Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein

• The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt

• Software Architecture for Developers: Volume 1 - Technical leadership and the balance with agility by Simon Brown

• Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design by Scott W. Ambler, Pramodkumar J. Sadalage

• Design and Build Great Web APIs by Mike Amundsen

• Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks: When Threads Unravel by Paul Butcher

• Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy

• Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual by John Sonmez

• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin

• Software Craftsman, The: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride by Sandro Mancuso

• Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions by Gayle Laakmann McDowell

• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts by Kevlin Henney

With a passion for .net (an older version list)

• Pro C# 5.0 and the .NET 4.5 Framework by Andrew Troelsen

• Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 by Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson, K. Scott Allen

• Pro ASP.NET Web API Security: Securing ASP.NET Web API by Badrinarayanan Lakshmiraghavan

• The Art of Unit Testing: With Examples in .NET by Roy Osherove

• RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity by Subbu Allamaraju

With a passion for Elixir/Erlang

• Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems by Francesco Cesarini, Steve Vinoski

• Programming Elixir: Functional, Concurrent, Pragmatic, Fun by Dave Thomas

• Designing Elixir Systems with OTP by James Edward Gray II

• Adopting Elixir: From Concept to Production by Ben Marx, José Valim, Bruce Tate

• Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir by Svilen Gospodinov

With a passion for Python

• Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming by Luciano Ramalho

• Mastering Python High Performance by Fernando Doglio

For the Architects

• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans

• Software Architecture in Practice by Len Bass, Paul Clements, Rick Kazman

• The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Jason Fung

• Microservices in Action by Morgan Bruce, Paulo A. Pereira

• Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith by Sam Newman

• Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures by Neal Ford, Mark Richards

• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler

• Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach by George Fairbanks

• Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems by Sam Newman

• The Systems Bible: The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small by John Gall

• Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Patrick Kua

• The TOGAF® Standard, 10th Edition — Introduction and Core Concepts by The Open Group

• 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts by Richard Monson-Haefel, Kevlin Henney

• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

For Leaders

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable” by Patrick Lencioni

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

• Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers by Lois P. Frankel

• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri

• Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott

• Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track by Will Larson

• When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté

• The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results by Stephen Bungay

• Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet

• Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach by Gerald M. Weinberg

• The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer

• What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies by Tim Urban

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford

• Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell

• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet

• Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas