Books are the best resource for sharing knowledge in a not-assisted way. They go deep into a topic, or more briefly over a bunch of them. Although, as a Software Engineer, I learned a lot from blog posts, tweets, and conference talks, it was books that prepared me for the Tech Lead role.

For this article, I created a list of 3 classic books I consider essential for whose transitioning — or desires to transition — to a leadership position in technology.

Books can teach us many things. It’s familiar to us to feel like there’re too many things to learn and too little time to absorb it. We tend to get anxious and overloaded with the content easily. Relax.

Take your time on reading, and take your time practicing it. Theory and practice converge at some point, and you realize you’ve been a leader for quite some time.

It’s been quite a while since their publication. So, you may notice some old stories during your reading. However, I think they are classic, and as any other book in this category, they aged very well.

That said, let’s go to the list.

1. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

The book was first published in 1987. The authors, Tom DeMarco and Timothy R. Lister talk about managing people through lots of stories. The stories may sound outdated and unlikely to happen nowadays, but their essence is still valid.

Many things stated by the two authors are kind of obvious, like_ how expensive the turnover is, that we should include the team in the hiring process and that methodologies are restrictive_.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to recapitulate those topics; some were written more than 30 years ago.

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