List the top books you consider fundamental to your software engineering knowledge and abilities. A book that really made you improve. Anything, up to you. The point is that without it you would be worse off.
Any topic. Systems design, DSA, security, architecture, doesn’t matter.

never found a programming book to be useful and I read several programming ones

also read non-programming ones and those can be more interesting. but I even find most of those to be empty and not very useful... I can collect ideas about how possibly real-life systems function from them though

I seem to learn by knowing what lego pieces I have at my disposal and then I just always figure out that I can place them in new and exotic ways to meet arbitrary goal X

I guess liars and outliers might be considered a technical book since it was from an info sec guy? changed my perspective on the world for the better I think

there's also some weird ass fluid dynamics book I found pretty exciting and I wanted to use it for logistics programming (thinking in systems: a primer)

hackers and painters was one of my favorites when I began reading but is about culture and ideas, not really programming

game design theory: a new philosophy is cool, but not software

books for a career probably would have to be psychology books

I don't find any I found to be useful and I've read many. like even Robert Green's stuff is a load of horseshit, and loads of people love that stuff and practice it which is sad and schizophrenic

HR books might be of use so you know HR's perspective
101 how to run a business books can be useful so you know the perspective of business people, or at least their concerns and where their arbitrary nonsense comes from

Ryan Holiday is actually pretty cool, if you wanna see career politics in action

"how to make friends and influence people" should be read around 15 years old. gift it to your kids

I read that when I was 20. just basic non-bullshit how to have decent social skills and be mildly charismatic and know how to talk to people so you don't self-doubt yourself later stuff

"psycho-cybernetics" for anyone who is into self improvement. only book you'll ever need

it also goes over emotional problems somewhat

Before the search engines, there was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

it's an MS-DOS TSR program and while you're coding and need help, just press a key-combination and it will appear on your screen. Yeah, it's not a book, but it's the most helpful one than any book.

It started as a blog but later I think he published it as a book, great resource for graphics with OpenGL

https://learnopengl.com/

I also learned a lot from "game engine architecture". When I started learning C++ I found "effective C++" very helpful.

PHP5 - Peter Kassenaar. It's how I learned to do sql injections

@Witaya07 I will not permit u to share

The Dragon Book, obviously ;>

Also the Linux kernel coding style guide, which is not a book, but a very good read nonetheless. I recommend it.

The Phoenix Project

No book should be considered fundamental. Just use your mind. Read some parts of any book that interest you.