Here are some books that caught our fancy lately. It may interest you too.

1. Ambient Findability by Peter Morville (blog)
Intelligence is moving to the edges, flowing through wireless devices, empowered individuals, and distributed teams. Ideas are spreading like wildfire, and information is in the air, literally. And yet, with the profusion of instantly accessible information, we still experience disorientation. We still wander off the map. How do we make decisions in the information age? How do we know enough to ask the right questions? How do we find the best product, the right person, the data that makes a difference?

In the book "Ambient Findability," Peter Morville searches for the answers in the strange connections between social software, semantic webs, evolutionary psychology, and interaction design.  And, he explains how the journey from push to pull is changing not only the rules of marketing and design, but also the nature of authority and the destination of our culture.

Thought-provoking and insightful, "Ambient Findability" will be of interest to any "user experience professionals" who design, build, and manage web sites and interactive products. But the book will also hold appeal for anyone interested in the future of architecture, business, communication, education, design, literacy, marketing, and other areas of work touched by the information age.

2. Practical Development Environments by Matthew B. Doar
You can have great coders, a terrific idea,top-of-the-line technology, even deep funding, but a project can still fail without a toolsmith. Every project has a toolsmith--some are pre-defined full-time positions, but often the de facto (and usually unspoken role) of toolsmith falls to the person who happens to have the skill set, the interest, or who just didn't duck the onerous task quickly enough. Either way, making the choices about tools, installing them, and then maintaining the tools that everyone else depends upon can prove vital to the project.

Building a development environment may not be a sexy topic to most people, but it's an essential one. Developers want to write code, not maintain makefiles. Writers want to write content instead of managing templates. IT provides machines, but doesn't have time to maintain all the different tools. And managers, of course, want the product to move smoothly from development to release.  Ergo, the onus of creating and maintaining a productive technical environment rests with the individual who ends up being a toolsmith for his or her group.

But building an effective development environment is not only not sexy; it's not easy either. How do you decide which tools to use for any given project? What do you look for in a tool--and what do you avoid? Which can you rely on? Which will help automate your processes? How do you discover the pitfalls or annoyances of any given tool--before you're in knee deep?

Practical advice is hard to come by, and trial and error on the fly is not only time consuming and frustrating, but potentially hazardous to the health of a project.

Unlike most tech books, "Practical Development Environments" doesn't tell you how to write faster code, or how to write code with fewer memory leaks, or even how to debug code at all. It's a practical approach to the challenges that confront toolsmiths every day: how to build the product in better ways, how to keep track of the code that's written, and how to track the bugs in code.

Another book that my be of interest also:

1. The Cult of iPod by Leander Kahney (blog)
Since its first iPod model hit the market in 2001, Apple has sold more than 21 million iPods, from the no-frills Shuffle up to the flagship 60GB iPod. "The Cult of iPod," like its predecessor "The Cult of Mac," takes readers on a tour of everything iPod with gorgeous four-color photos, stylish layout and design, and tales of users who devote considerable time, energy, and imagination to their gadgets.

Meet the little-known practice of iPod-jacking (strangers plugging into each other's iPods to find new music); discover the growing legions of MP3Js (regular folks who use their iPods to become DJs); and meet average joes who create their own professional quality iPod commercials just for fun. "The Cult of iPod" looks at the cottage industries that have sprung up to capitalize on the iPod's popularity, too, from both fun and functional accessories to services that build customized playlists or will convert your entire CD library into the iTunes format. "The Cult of iPod" also covers the trend of celebrities and fashion mavens who've customized their iPods and made high-end limited edition carrying cases, as well as gadget freaks who've modded their iPods into one-of-a-kind designs that make techies drool.