Specialty Reading by Topic

If you want to know more about… …then read
Product Design The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman This seminal book on product design introduces many fundamentals of the discipline, most importantly the relationship between people and objects. The author has several other similar works if you can't get enough or one of the others catches your eye. They are all useful.
Thinking Like a Designer The Ten Faces of Innovation, by Thomas Kelley and Jonathan Littman This provides the layman a vivid and actionable introduction to design thinking.
Visual Communication Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte Edward Tufte's groundbreaking work catalyzed a superior union of data and graphic design. Even though a thorough reading of this book probably won't make you a graphic designer, it will work wonders on your ability to take a disciplined approach to visual communication. Edward Tufte has several good books in this area.
Programming The Art and Science of Java, by Eric Roberts A lot of excellent (free) resources are online that deal with programming. If you're new to programming, or even more so, engineering, this book will give you a strong grounding in the foundation ideas of how to approach it. To reiterate, you do not need to learn programming to be successful in a technology-enabled business. I've provided this reference in case the material here has stoked your interest in sitting down and writing code.
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