Garry Tan

Krug's web usability primer has stayed relevant for over two decades because its core argument — that good interfaces require no instruction — is timeless. The chapters on navigation conventions and usability testing with five users are still the most practical introduction to the discipline.

The book that introduced affordances, signifiers, and feedback loops to a generation of designers. Norman's analysis of why doors, phones, and stoves confuse people is the clearest argument that bad design is a systems failure, not user error. Everything else on this list builds on this vocabulary.

Inside Y Combinator in the years before Altman ran it.

Where the worry about others' judgement of us comes from, and how people overcome it.

How trauma reshapes the body and brain, and the treatments that help survivors.

Rene Girard's theory that people imitate each other's desires, applied to business.

Reflexivity, where beliefs move prices and prices move facts, tested in a live diary.

Machiavelli's handbook on political strategy remains disturbing because it separates effectiveness from morality — a distinction every strategic thinker eventually has to confront. His analysis of how new rulers consolidate power is still the sharpest treatment of legitimacy under conditions of uncertainty.

The standard guide to the Perl programming language.