If you are a web application developer and you want to read some good books that don’t deal with programming or web design but are more focused on how to build web sites that are useful, profitable and up and running before you get bored of building them, then I have three recommendations -

Don’t Make Me Think - Steve Krug
This book is all about common sense, which believe it or not designers tend to throw out of the window when building user interfaces. This is normally because in the mind of the designer everything works just as they planned. Give your user interface to someone else to test and be amazed at how differently they try and navigate around it. Google’s success is not just because they have good search results but also how easy it is to use. The book uses examples of interface changes over the years of some of the most popular websites on the internet.

Getting Real - 37 Signals
This book is an excellent resource for learning how to cut wasted time in a work environment by rapid prototyping and as the title says “the smarter, faster, easier way to build a web app”. The books authors invented Ruby on Rails which provides rapid prototyping and code generation functionality, GENNIT can be used to build your .NET applications faster, smarter and easier as well!

The Business Rules - David A. Eichenbaum
Not normally a book that gets reviewed along side the other two. The Business Rules deals with the business end of building a business (and web application). Free isn’t a great way to earn money from a web application and this book drills it in. It gives examples of how even the biggest of companies messed up there profits by not following simple business rules such as “sell it for more than it cost you” - one of my favourite rules in the book.