My top 5 DevOps book recommendations

In a recent Office Hour (which I hold every Friday on my live streaming channels), a viewer asked about DevOps books. They wanted to know which reads I would recommend to someone freshly entering the DevOps space. I was able to list a few, but couldn’t come up with all the ones I find useful on the spot. So I compiled a list of the top 5 DevOps books I think every software engineer and system administrator should read.

The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford)

This is an unusual non-fiction book, because the authors chose to package their insight in a novel. I first learned to appreciate this fun storytelling approach when I found Patrick Lencioni’s management books. In “The Phoenix Project”, we follow Bill, the new VP of IT at Parts Unlimited, as he tries to salvage a business-critical project that’s gone way off the rails. I read this book after leaving my corporate IT management job, and it sure triggered some light PTSD.

The DevOps handbook

The DevOps Handbook (Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Dubios, and John Willis)

This is a must-read for engineers interested in DevOps. The books comes with more than a dozen case studies that illustrate how organizations can benefit from implementing DevOps. It also gives practical advice on how to do that.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery (Jez Humble and David Farley)

The delivery process that leads to software changes getting deployed in production is at the very heart of DevOps. This book looks at all the components that are necessary for successful delivery, for example infrastructure management, virtualisation and automated testing.

Accelerate

Accelerate (Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim)

Based on four years of groundbreaking research, this DevOps book links software delivery effectiveness to business value. It’s a comprehensive, data-driven treatise on key practices and the metrics that support them.

Team Topologies

Team Topologies (Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton)

This book focuses on the non-technical aspects of DevOps. In the “CALMS” acronym that’s popular in DevOps circles, the “C” stands for “culture” and the “S” stands for “sharing”. Team Topologies covers topics such as team composition, mutual trust, cognitive load and hand-offs. It also shines a light at the growing importance of platform engineering teams. 

You will have noticed that there are some prolific authors in this list who contributed a lot of insight to the growing DevOps space. Most of them are active members of the DevOps community, and not only will you find their talks online, you can also meet them at major conferences. I was happy (and star-struck) to have lunch with Gene Kim once!