BOOKS! I’m running dangerously low on books and would love some FoC related recommendations. I feel I barely know what’s out there. Edit: am now out of books, please save me.

My suggestion is off-topic for FoC, but for FoB (future-of-books)... I highly recommend Reality Hunger by David Shields. Read that and see what it does to your brain. And then I think that new brain will have some fresh perspectives on FoC. Reality Hunger is a thought-experiment about employing collage for new types of composition. I think it's relevant to this group because so many FoC meta-patterns correlate to collage - placing in free-space, implicit connection, higher-order effects, ease of creation.

Not really FoC but I enjoyed The Idea Factory which is about Bell Labs

Can't ever read too much Borges. Speaking of Borges — if you want a collection of FoC-relevant short-form pieces (fiction and non), this textbook can be had for like $10 used on Amazon — http://www.newmediareader.com. Worth the price just for the cute ways the make the book interlinked, in an attempt to treat trad. media like hypermedia.

@Chris G @Chris Knott ordered!

Garden of Forking Paths is included in the NMR. I'd also recommend The Library of Babel (another short story). You may want to just grab the Ficciones collection, or the Labyrinths collection (they have a lot of overlap, mind)

Paul Graham's essays http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html A few on programming languages, lots on innovation. Rob Fitzpatrick - the mom test - I have posted about this here before. A system fore measuring the impact of an innovation. About management, but gets recommended by several IT founders (google, drop box ...) - High Output Management. Explains how managers can add value - has about 10 ways a manager can add value, all with examples.  - 6 hours - as 3 videos here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjPe7ShLW8Mau1qXt5ledTw?feature=emb_ch_name_ex - The Innovators Dilemma - Clayton Christensen - Evidence based book describing innovations that fail when you try to implement them in a large business. He shows that some innovations work in a new business, rather than an established business. He explains how and why with examples.

A book on FoC feels like a contradiction to me. We can't write a book about the future until we have a design for it, and once we do, we'd probably choose to build it instead! What does that leave? Just history and criticisms of the discipline (both backwards-looking), plus science fiction? (You may find value in those, of course.)

To the contrary — I think most of what we're doing here in this community, when it comes to looking forward (so ignoring all our exploration of history), is generating or curating speculative fictions about the future of computing, and then collectively working out how to reify some parts of those fictions. (I prefer the term speculative fiction to science fiction, since not all aspects of FoC fall under the umbrella of science, but that's just semantics). So it's not that a book on FoC would be a contradiction — a book on FoC would be indistinguishable from the prime purpose of the community.

These are the books I keep coming back to, years later (that may be relevant to the crowd here): https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/1118766571 https://www.amazon.com/Pedagogy-Oppressed-Anniversary-Paulo-Freire/dp/1501314130 https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028 https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Safer-World-Systems-Thinking/dp/0262533693 https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-Generation/dp/1935401009

Computer Lib and Notes on the Synthesis of Form are what I would consider essential reading in this area. Tools for Thought by Howard Rheingold is an excellent chronology, spanning many centuries (basically from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace to the end of Xerox PARC). Lately I've been reading through Philosophical Essays of Leibniz, mostly trying to understand the concept of a characteristica universalis that he introduced in one of his many papers. This has a strong relation to the concept of a "pattern language", which is what currently captivates me. Here is my list of FoC-adjacent books I've aggregated over the last year or so: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/100125761-chris-rabl?shelf=future-of-coding&utf8=✓

@crabl ordered the Leibniz essays! I’ve read the others and love them all, seems we have overlapping interests. Your linked collection is awesome and there’s quite a few there I’m going to have to read soon.

Oh man, I almost forgot a huge favorite : https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

I suggest The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. I don't agree with everything, but it has interesting concepts.

@Mariano Montone it’s already on its way!

It's dated, but I read Nardi's A Small Matter of Programming recently and thought it very good. It's about design for end-user programming.