What good books you would recommend that cover the history of software and profession and biographies in the software world? - (i.e. not technical, fiction or project management literature)
I've recently read "Nerds. The brief history of the Internet" and really liked it.
Stackoverflow Archive:
One thing I like to do is to start by looking up the "luminaries" of the field in Wikipedia. Their articles tend to have a nice bit of history about the people and their contributions. Also, they tend to have some links to books or other resources about them.
As for books, Masters of Doom is a good non-fic/biography about the id Johns (Carmack & Romero). You can pull some important lessons out of the fiery wreck that was Daikatana, and the book gives some nice "inside baseball" kinds of insights into what went wrong.
I recommend the book Microsoft Secrets to developers, no matter where they're working. It's a detailed examination of exactly how Microsoft builds software. It does include some project management, but mostly focuses on how the developers work. It's fascinating and illuminating.
I liked 'In the beginning was the commandline' from Neal Stephenson.