Ask MetaFilter’s best introductory books

When talking about the Best Books I linked to this great Ask MetaFilter thread from 2007: What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?.

The whole thing’s worth a read but a while back I decided to go through, give it a squeeze, and extract the juicy bits: the books themselves. So below is a list of books, grouped into topics, as recommended by the thread.

This doesn’t list every book mentioned. I left out some where the topic was particularly narrow and I left out others where the poster give no impression of knowing anything about the field other than having read the single book they recommend.

And, of course, this is quite an arbitrary list of subjects and books — ask the same question of a different group of people and most of the list will no doubt be different (although the books that are the same… those will be the interesting ones). Anyway, here’s the list:

Most of the links are to the pages the original Ask MetaFilter posters linked to; I’ve added some where no link was given.