Favorite books ...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

This book follows in the vein of his previous: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life. "My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know...." Those who have experienced large complex projects will appreciate the role of randomness. The path of a project is more often than not influenced by factors, events that cannot be predicted with certainty. Most often there are too many unknowns, too many risks lurking to manifest at the wrong moment. The trick is to not become a fool of randomness.

Michael Nygard: Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

This book must be read by anyone who architects large scale productive systems. Many neglected aspects concerning operational manageability - through the experience of deploying and maintaining large and "mission critical" systems. This book is hits all the real issues to the point - presenting these in the form of patterns and anti-patterns.