The essential "how to" book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.

The classic book on the human elements of software engineering. Software tools and development environments may have changed in the 21 years since the first edition of this book, but the peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups has not changed an epsilon. If you write code or depend upon those who do, get this book as soon as possible — from Amazon.com Books, your library, or anyone else. You (and/or your colleagues) will be forever grateful. Very Highest Recommendation.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste huge amounts of money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. They have let the inmates run the asylum. Alan Cooper offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line.

There are books on algorithms that are rigorous but not complete and books that cover masses of material but are not rigorous. Introduction to Algorithms combines the attributes of comprehensiveness and comprehensibility. It will be equally useful as a text, a handbook, and a general reference.

Introduction to Algorithms covers both classical material and such modern developments as amortized analysis and parallel algorithms. The mathematical exposition, while rigorous, is carefully detailed so that it will be accessible to all levels of readers. Chapters are organized so that they start with elementary material and progress to more advanced topics.

Each chapter is relatively self-contained and can be used as a unit of study. Algorithms are presented in a pseudocode that can be easily read by anyone familiar with Fortran, C, or Pascal. Numerous pertinent examples, figures, exercises, and case-study problems emphasize both engineering and mathematical aspects of the subject.

Jeff Cox has done it again. The coauthor of Zapp! and The Goal—bestselling business books that employ engaging fictional tales to advance a slew of practical suggestions—now teams with marketing specialist Howard Stevens to do for sales what his previous efforts did for motivation and productivity. In Selling the Wheel, he crafts a witty story around solid sales fundamentals that Stevens has gleaned from a quarter-century of research and analysis. Its hero is a fledgling old-time entrepreneur named Max who invents the wheel but can't get anybody to buy one. With marketing assistance from his wife ("In the olden days," Cox explains, "women almost always did the marketing"), and guidance from a cave-dwelling wise man, Max ultimately succeeds with help from four distinctly different types of salespeople, dubbed Closer, Wizard, Builder, and Captain. While this may sound silly when taken out of context, the story is entertaining and, more important, filled with sound tips that could help sales professionals and their managers deal with varying evolutionary phases of any product or service. Among its many nuggets: "Silence has been used for centuries as a closing technique. The game is simple. After asking a closing question, say nothing—because the person who speaks next loses." —Howard Rothman

Peopleware asserts that most software development projects fail because of failures within the team running them. This strikingly clear, direct book is written for software development team leaders and managers, but it's filled with enough common-sense wisdom to appeal to anyone working in technology. Authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister include plenty of illustrative, often amusing anecdotes; their writing is light, conversational, and filled with equal portions of humour and wisdom, and there is a refreshing absence of "new age" terms and multi-step programmes. The advice is presented straightforwardly and ranges from simple issues of prioritisation to complex ways of engendering harmony and productivity in your team. Peopleware is a short read that delivers more than many books on the subject twice its size. —Jake Bond