These are books whose lessons I find accessible, enjoyable, and of enduring value.
Books
This podcast is driven by my interest in solving problems and "Debugging" by David J. Agans is one of my favorite books about solving problems. His style is humorous and the problem solving situations are relatable. Most of the examples are about electrical, electronic, and software problems, so it helps to have a little bit of knowledge about such things, but you don't need much.
Agans shares 9 rules for debugging: Understand the System, Make It Fail, Quit Thinking and Look, Divide and Conquer, Change One Thing at a Time, Keep an Audit Trail, Check the Plug, Get a Fresh View, and If You Didn't Fix It, It Ain't Fixed
The book is built around war stories where Agans explains the rules and how he applied them in specific cases. As he says, these are obvious rules, but remembering them and applying them appropriately when needed is not.
This is a book I enjoy flipping through to revisit the stories and the problem solving rules.
Check out his website and download a poster of the rules and buy a copy of the book: Debugging Rules
"The Dynamics of Software Development" by Jim McCarthy is charming and funny and full of valuable insights about the process of creating intellectual property--really the process of getting smarter in the pursuit of delivering a product or service. It's a book filled with pithy insights and quotes--one of the first is "More people have ascended bodily into heaven than shipped great software on time."
While it's written about the process of developing and shipping packaged software (it was published in 1995), I have seen all of the same dynamics in the development of mechanical products.
There are two editions, the first published in 1995 and the second published in 2006. I much prefer the first edition. The second edition feels like a lot of new lessons were slapped on; the additions don't feel integrated to the original. They're out of print, but you can find used copies on Amazon.com.
You can see Jim McCarthy present some of the rules on YouTube on his wife Michele's channel. Here's a link to the Rule 1 video: Don't Know What You Don't Know
"Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions" by Edward R. Tufte radicalized me. It is actually a chapter taken from the author's book "Visual Explanations" and reviews the analyses performed by John Snow for the 1854 Cholera outbreak in London and the 1986 decision to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger which ended in tragedy.
My radicalization came with respect to the Space Shuttle disaster. I was 19 years old when the Challenger disaster occurred. My path to becoming an engineer started with seeing an Apollo rocket launch on TV when I was a small child. I was devastated when the disaster occurred.
I had long believed that the reason the disaster occurred was because of the managers. After reading Tufte's analysis, I came to conclude that incoherent and confusion communication from technical experts is the true cause of the disaster. They clearly understood the problem, but they couldn't clearly explain it. Having worked with many, many technical people, this is typical.
You can find this book on Amazon.com and it's quite affordable.