Some great software design and architecture books

A friend and fellow self-taught programmer asked me to recommend some good books he and his team could read to buttress their Ruby design and architecture knowledge. I definitely recognized my friend's situation: after you spend years consuming short-form content like blog posts, tech talks, and screencasts, it becomes hard to organize your store of knowledge. You need labels for concepts, you need semantic layers of knowing. You need to think more deeply and comprehensively, with longer examples. You need books!

So here are some of my favorite software design/architecture books, not all of which are Ruby specific:

Design Patterns in Ruby
Ruby Best Practices
Objects on Rails
The RSpec Book
Code Complete

Clean Code

I haven't read these yet but they're on my list:

Clean Ruby
Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby


Also, Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node is very relevant to web developers in any language. AdStaq is going to have a hypermedia API; in fact we're making it a central part of our sales pitch.