Books you should be reading right now

If you work as a developer, designer or something in between, you know you must update your skills. It’s like fuel, you got to have it, otherwise you will end up in a dead end with little work, or worse, no work at all.
If you are like me, you hate being outdated and you are curious about new stuff that comes out almost every week.
It’s kinda hard to keep up with it all, so many new technologies, some of them will prevail some of them won’t. What to choose ?
Should your precious time be considered for learning a new technology that may be forgotten in a couple of months ?

Well, it’s really up to you.
I will however try to help you. Here are some of books you should be reading in order to improve your technical and personal skills.

The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right, Second Edition
If you don’t know what Django is, you really should come out of that rock more often. Django is a MVC MVT Python framework, and in one word, “awesome” is what comes to my mind. Django is an ORM, fully OO, already build with a cool template system, plus a ready-to go admin interface. If you don’t know Python don’t worry, it’s a very easy language to learn.

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide
CouchDB is a fully high-scalable database, it’s also known as a NoSQL database, and if you are building web apps for a huge crowd, you will definitely need to know this.

Don’t make me think
What can let your application to fail , even if it’s a good tool ? Speed ? Marketing ? No, usability, if your application is hard to understand and to use, users won’t, well….use it, even if it do wonders behind it. So get this book and start doing some designs with user usability concerns.

Rework
This book is mind blowing if you like me hate the way some of the IT companies are run out. It was written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37Signals. It’s all so simple stuff that really makes you think, for instance, why some projects fail and why workaholics are bad for a company, why less is more, and why VC funding is not always the best option. I’ve read it in 3hours, awesome.

Web Application Design Patterns (Interactive Technologies)
This is not a so technical book, but has great tips on how to design great web apps by comparing with some of the best web sites right now. Once again, it’s never enough to bold the statement that a great web app can’t be just a good tool, it must be user friendly and easy to use.

Beginning HTML5 and CSS3: Next Generation Web Standards
I really shouldn’t even tell you why you should read this. Specially if you are front end dev.

Update: This book is not yet published, but you should really consider it in a couple of months.

A lot more could be added, give me your feedback and what books should be here for a second part of this series.