Books for geeks

TL;DR: I’ve read quite a few books over the years about technology, open source, and business. Here are some of my favorite.

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One of my favorite perks of working at GitHub is the fact that the company covers all your work-related reading. That (plus a good deal of travel over the years) means that I’ve read quite a few books about technology, about open source, and about business.

If those topics sound interesting, here are some of my favorite books for hackers, for geeks, and for open source developers.

Of course, if you have a recommendation, I’m always looking for new books to read. Let me know in the comments below.

Originally published July 11, 2016 | View revision history

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Ben Balter is the Director of Engineering Operations and Culture at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as Chief of Staff for Security, he managed the office of the Chief Security Officer, improving overall business effectiveness of the Security organization through portfolio management, strategy, planning, culture, and values. As a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development. More about the author →

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