The same question was asked on Ask Metafilter a decade ago, and received 237 answers: <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/71101/What-single-book-is-the-best-introduction-to-your-field-or-specialization-within-your-field-for-laypeople" rel="nofollow">http://ask.metafilter.com/71101/What-single-book-is-the-best...</a>
The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to
Digital Signal Processing
By Steven W. Smith, Ph.D.<p><a href="http://www.dspguide.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dspguide.com/</a><p><a href="http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm</a>
When I was doing Bluetooth Low Energy development for IoT devices, this book was the goto reference for both the embedded firmware and mobile app folks:<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Low-Energy-Developers-Handbook/dp/013288836X" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Low-Energy-Developers-Handb...</a>
Rebel Buddha by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Buddha-Guide-Revolution-Mind/dp/1590309294" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Buddha-Guide-Revolution-Mind/dp...</a>
"More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite" by Sebastian Mallaby - this is a great read and motivator for someone interested in quantitative trading systems - started as a side project for me, but looks like it will give me my early retirement + my legacy money to leave behind one day...
Hands down the best book to give an intro into my field: "How to win friends & influence people" by Dale Carnegie.<p>(I am a startup CEO, w/ technical background. Learnt a LOT from this book. Would probably not be in the same job if I hadn't read this)<p>Other good books that will give an intro into tech startup management for laypeople:<p>-Zero to One (Peter Thiel)<p>-The hard thing about Hard things (Ben Horowitz)
One of the first books many many years back, introducing me to software business and open source culture
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
By Eric S. Raymond-
<a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/</a>
For pure linguistics I'd recommend <i>Transformational Grammar</i> by Andrew Radford and <i>Metaphors We Live By</i> by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.<p>And for NLP, Dan Jurafski and James H. Martin's <i>Speech and Language Processing</i> is excellent, and there are great projects like spaCy, NLTK, WordNet, FrameNet, COCA. etc.
<i>48. The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.</i> -- Alan J. Perlis<p><a href="http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html</a>
As a systems administrator with an eye toward DevOps principles, I highly recommend (the possibly cliché) <i>The Phoenix Project</i> by by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spaffor.<p>It's a novel that reads like a thriller, but is infused with IT info.
"Getting started with Raspberry Pi" is a wonderful introduction to systems, Linux, and IOT projects. Super approachable language, but also quite complete.