Heuristics book
In June Kim’s Listmania list, “Zen of Programming”, I found George Polya’s How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method. From its back cover:
This [book] was written by an eminent mathematician, but it is a book on how to thing straight in any field. The work was a major influence on the revival of “heuristics”—or the study of the methods and rules of discovery and invention [my emphasis]. In lucid and appealing prose, it shows how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem that can be “reasoned” out….