The Art of UNIX Programming

Raymond gathers and articulates the design principles that made Unix what it is — modularity, clarity, composition, transparency — and argues they are not Unix trivia but a general ethics of engineering. Read it alongside Kernighan and Pike: where they show you the environment, Raymond extracts the philosophy. For a product director this is the clearest written account of why software written in a certain tradition ages well and software written against it does not. It is also a rare book that takes taste seriously as a technical concept. A caveat: Raymond has strong opinions outside the technical material — read him for the architecture, not the politics.