Possibly slightly off-topic, but one of the best novels I've ever read when it came to handling an alien (yet understandable) species is Eric Flint's 'Mother of Demons'. Which, despite the name, has no actual fantasy-esque demons in it, and is a really fascinating look at what happens when a shipful of human colonists--a few adults, but the rest are all children--gets shipwrecked on an alien planet full of very deadly sapient life ... that all happens to be descended from the alien equivalent of mollusks. It's a really intriguing read, and I've cribbed a lot of ideas from it for TF worldbuilding.

I've also read a ton of space sci-fi and whatnot, but I'm afraid most of it tends to blur together after a while, and I don't have nearly as good a memory for the mechanical things I crib from that side of sci-fi. A lot of cyberbunk, a lot of space marines stuff--David Weber's 'March to the Stars' series, especially, has a lot of interesting ideas for high-tech combat and spy vs. spy stuff, even if he tends to go on overly-long tangents about the development of this particular tech, or that particular gun. -__-;; And of course, McCaffrey's 'Ships Who Sang' universe is awesome for that stuff too ... particularly the idea of ships that have such long lifespans that they can take the long view, and enough spare processing power to crunch through and predict things that shorter-lived humans never get the chance to put together ....