Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

PeopleWare. I read it and then re-read it every year.

Peopleware by Demarco and Lister is one of my all-time favorites. The Pragmatic Programmer is also great.

If you will be programming in Java, my condolences. (yes, I'm ready for the downvotes). I'm sure there's some nice Java code out there. I recently agreed to do a Java project, and the 6 months I was at it sucked the joy of programming out of me. I've spent the last few years doing Python, C and K, and in comparison, Java is so bureaucratic that I felt like 10% of my work was advancing towards my goal, and 90% was bureaucracy (compared to 20% bureaucracy in C, 5% in Python and 0.001% in K) And as for books, I recommend Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls" series, Steve McConnell's "Software Project Survival Guide" and DeMarco and Lister's "PeopleWare". The last two have more to do with project (and people) management than with software engineering - but you will need these skills much earlier than you'd expect, perhaps even in your first couple of months of work. And PeopleWare is a short and enjoyable read, you could put it in the "leisure" pile.