Recursive make

Read this awesome paper recently:  Recursive Make Considered Harmful.  it is suprising how often we carry broken things deeply into our lives in the name of "folk knowledge".

If first principles were more often reflected upon, we will create a more functional world. Things like vaastu and assorted indian rituals come to mind :)....

End to end arguments

Came across this design paper recently and it is a great read http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=357402

Art of unix programming

Came across this book recently  and it is totally worth a read! Unix would have made much more sense to me had I read this in college :)

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/

The Art of Unix Programming attempts to capture the engineering wisdom and philosophy of the Unix community as it's applied today — not merely as it has been written down in the past, but as a living "special transmission, outside the scriptures" passed from guru to guru. Accordingly, the book doesn't focus so much on "what" as on "why", showing the connection between Unix philosophy and practice through case studies in widely available open-source software.

The long tail

A very good read: The long tail