A fun book, documenting what changes take place in buildings after people live in them, adapt them to their needs. It's an interesting spin on architecture, looking more at how a building works for people than how it looks as a piece of sculpture. Plenty of practical information here if you're thinking of building a space, and plenty of aesthetic information to change the way you think about buildings.
The coolest thing for me with this book, though, was how it seemed to inform my understanding of writing software. I've always been careful to write my code not just so that it works, but so that the structure of the code itself follows a certain aesthetic. Well-designed source code to me means that foremost it is readable - I don't mean comments, I mean that it's written in a logical, readable way (if something is obscure, comment it thoroughly). My code is designed not just to run right, but to be understandable by others (and by myself later), to be extensible. To adapt to people's needs. Brand's book is about designing buildings that way, and it's interesting to see how well the analogy works. I'm not sure that How Buildings Learn has changed the way I write code, but it has changed the way I talk about it.