Here I collect for various (scientific) fields the absolutely most important books. Totemic Tomes if you will. Books you can’t miss. Books that everyone in a field should have read, or belatedly discover they haven’t yet. The book you wish you’d known about before wading through several mediocre works.

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges

Many of these books are still entirely relevant, but a few have been overtaken by new discoveries, but have however not relinquished their epic status. Some of these books are so popular that there is a sort of counter culture of people pointing out the minor flaws in these exalted works. But to me, these attacks only serve to show just how important these books are.

If you have additions to this list, from fields already mentioned, or from other areas, I’d love to hear about it on bert@hubertnet.nl! Books are for sharing. Especially the very good ones. At the very end of this post I expound a bit further on what kind of books I hope to fill this page with.

By Diliff - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42693401

Some of these books are extraordinarily expensive. However, with some work, you can find second hand or digital copies online for most of them. Also, the dates mentioned below refer to the publication history of the book, not to the lifetime of the author! Finally, some books feature very unfortunate passages where the author turns out to (also) have terrible opinions. I’ve opted to still include these books, but know these books and authors are definitely not perfect.

Biology

• The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology, Horace Freeland Judson (1996) - history
• Molecular Biology of the Cell, Bruce Alberts, Rebecca Heald, Alexander Johnson, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, Peter Walter (1983 - 2022) - still current
• Evolution, Douglas Futuyma and Mark Kirkpatrick (2005 - 2022)
• Janeway’s Immunobiology, Kenneth M Murphy, Casey Weaver, Leslie J Berg (2001 - 2022)

Business / Economics

• Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton (1981 - 2011)
• Good strategy, bad strategy, Richard Rumelt (2011)
• The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen (1997). Some of the specific claims in the book have been criticised, but you still can’t get anywhere in innovation without knowing this work
• High Output Management, Andy Grove (1983). Like a slap in the face if you are used to contemporary management. Great stuff even despite all the wrong people liking it.
• The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham (1949 - 1973, 2003)

Chemistry

• General Chemistry, Linus Pauling (1970s), outdated, still very interesting

Climate

• Principles of Planetary Climate, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (2010)

Computing

• The C Programming Language, Kernighan & Ritchie (1988)
• Numerical Recipes, William H. Press, Saul A. Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling and Brian P. Flannery (1986 - 2002), still very useful
• Claude E. Shannon: Collected Papers
• The Linux Programming Interface, Michael Kerrisk (2010)
• Computer Organization and Design, David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy (- 2020)
• The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks (1975 - 1995)
• A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System, John Lions (1976)
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman (1984, 1996). There is also a later JavaScript based version. The second edition is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Data

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward R. Tufte (1983 - 2001)

Defense / military

• Ballistic Missile Defense, Ashton B. Carter, David N. Schwartz (1984)
• EW 104: Electronic Warfare, David L. Adamy (2015). EW 105 might also be interesting, but haven’t read it yet.

Electronics

• The Art of Electronics, Paul Horowitz, Winfield Hill (1980 - 2015)

GNSS / GPS / Galileo

• Springer Handbook of Global Navigation Satellite Systems, Peter J.G. Teunissen, Oliver Montenbruck (2017)

Philosophy (of science)

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)
• A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell (1946)

(Scientific) history

• The making of the atomic bomb, Ben Rhodes (1986)
• The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes (2008)
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shrirer (1960)

(Information) security, cryptography

• Security Engineering, Ross Anderson (2001 - 2020)
• The Codebreakers - The story of Secret Writing, David Kahn (1967 - 1996)

Intelligence, spying, national security

I have a separate page that lists useful spy books.

Networking, communications

• Internet Routing Architectures, Sam Halabi, Danny McPherson (2000)
• TCP/IP Illustrated, part 1, W. Richard Stevens (1994, 2011). Slightly dated in places, but still a model of how to explain technology well.
• How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C. Clarke (1992)

Physics

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Matthew Sands, Richard Feynman, and Robert B. Leighton - current
• Gravitation, Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler (1973, 2017) - current
• Thermodynamics, Enrico Fermi (1937, 1956) - current, very brief
• Course of Theoretical Physics, Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz (1930s - 1970s) - the physics it covers hasn’t changed.
• Radiative Processes in Astrophysics, George B. Rybicki, Alan P. Lightman (1985 - 2004)
• Principles of Optics, Max Born, Emil Wolf (1959 - 2019)
• Classical Electrodynamics, J. D. Jackson (1962, 1975, 1999). A stone cold classic, but also notoriously difficult.

Politics

• The Complete Yes Minister, The Complete Yes, Prime Minister, Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn (1980 - 1988). Although laugh out loud funny, this television series also exposes a lot of actual government/poltical working. Many politicians and government workers seem to regard it as some kind of manual even, but please don’t do that. The books are great renditions of the TV series.

Renewable energy

• Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, David MacKay (2009). Although this book famously got the huge price decrease in photovoltaics wrong, it is otherwise still an unmissable compendium.

Rocketry / spaceflight / aviation

• IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, John D. Clark (1972)

Writing

• On writing well: the classic guide to writing nonfiction , William Zinsser (1976)
• Roget’s Thesaurus, Peter Mark Roget (1852 - 2022)

Some more on what books should be on this page

So we all have books we love tremendously, but that does not necessarily mean those books are “totemic classics”. If this page listed every book someone was in love with it would become a very unwieldly list.

Key is that a book is so meaningful people use it as a reference, by which I mean more than ’look things up’ in. A classic book itself becomes part of the vocabulary. For instance, physicists might refer to Feynman’s explanation of how a gyroscope really works as an example of how math only gets you so far in understanding things.

Almost by definition, the books on this page will have been around for 10 years at least. Many have their own Wikipedia pages.

There are a few books on the list that are not as well known, but where I know from personal experience, or from people I know and trust, that the book changed their (professional) lives, and that it really should have been a classic. But it is hard to figure out which books have this status.

Some books are by now sadly so outdated, that despite being classics of their time, they can no longer be recommended since they’d steer you into harm’s way:

• Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier (1996)

There are also historical treasures that you’d however not likely use today to learn something:

• Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton (1687)
• On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859)
• Abramowitz and Stegun aka Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun (1964 - 1972). Public domain version

Finally, there are some really iconic books that I’ve owned and never had any use for. But people keep suggesting them, so here is a list of classics that didn’t work for me, but might work for you:

• The Art of Computer Programming, Donald E. Knuth (1968 -)
• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools aka “The Dragon Book”, Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman (1986, 2006)
• Design Patterns, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides (1994)

Unevaluated suggestions

People have suggested the following books, but I haven’t yet evaluated these. It is a lot. If you have any opinions or experiences, please let me know on bert@hubertnet.nl!

• Montaillou by Emmanuel Le Roy la Durie
• Anmerkungen zu Hitler (The meaning of Hitler) by Sebastian Haffner
• The Information by James Gleick
• Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Bob Pease - Troubleshooting Analog Circuits 1991
• “Absorption and Scattering of Light by Small Particles” by Bohren and Huffman
• For atmospheric science, “Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology” by Holton
• Dawn Of Everything
• Who We Are And How We Got Here
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Carnegie
• Influence by Cialdini
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Electrodynamics_(book)
• Architecture - A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
• “Debt: the first 5000 years” - David Graeber
• “The deficit myth” - Stephanie Kelton
• “The limits of growth”
• “Exactly” - Simon Winchester
• “Nuts and bolts” - Roma Agrawal
• ‘The Universal History of Numbers’ by Georges Ifrah
• Polya’s How to solve it
• Understanding data communications and networks, 3rd edition, William A. Shay (2003)
• Popper’s conjectures and refutations
• Organizational Ecology by Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman is sociology, addressing the lifecycle of businesses and other organizations.
• Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition by Ronald Burt is also sociology, focusing on the individual person’s place in a competitive world, and the nature of interpersonal powe
• Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Albert S. Woodhull: “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” (the Minix book)
• Caro, The Power Broker
• Caro, Johnson series
• Cramer, What It Takes
• White, The Making of The President
• Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
• Tooze, Crashed
• Modern Quantum Mechanics, J. J. Sakurai (1985 - 2020)
• The Quantum Theory of Fields by Weinberg
• Roughgarden, Joan, Evolution’s Rainbow
• Nielsen and Chuang: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
• Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Schein
• Psychology and Life
• Foundations of Social Theory