Bookshelf of an Entrepreneur

So I've finally left my old job after 12+ years and am the CEO of my new company MyRecipeCart.com Limited (more on that in a later post). It's not yet got very far, but I thought it would be worth a quick look back at some of the resources that helped me get to this point.

• The Beermat Entrepreneur - This was the first business book I read, shortly after ideas started sparking. It was an easy read, but got me thinking along the right lines at a very high level (people that would need to be involved, and how to test the business model for obvious flaws).
  
• Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) - This (and the rest of the Pragmatic Programmers books) are the standard reference for the Ruby on Rails web development framework. I devoured about a dozen of the books in this series and used the skills to try mocking up some of my ideas with quick and dirty prototypes. This really helped to refine the ideas and see what was important to focus on first.
• The Definitive Business Plan (Financial Times Series) - This one I read much later (over a year). I was still working for my old company, but the ideas had kept on ticking over, and I was thinking more seriously about whether I could make a business out of them. This book helped me do a much more critical analysis of the strengths, weaknesses and threats I would face, and how to actually write a plan for success.
• The Non-Designer's Design Book - As mentioned in a previous post, this helped my wife and I do the initial design for the website. It covers basic principles to help you achieve a strong, effective look with good usability.
• School for Startups - I attended several of these excellent events, and like the business books it helped me ask questions to establish the weaknesses and strengths of my business proposition.
• Smarta's company registration tool helped me easily create and register my business.

There are a lot of other resources I've used to get to this point, but those ones above were the key ones for me.