In this article, I am going to share my learnings on the top 10
books recommended by Ernest Mueller
and James Wickett who curated the DevOps course “DevOps Foundations with Ernest Mueller,
James Wickett” on Lynda.
This is a
republication from the content of the video.
Number 10, Visible Ops.
Visible Ops by Gene Kim is one of the bestselling IT books of all time. It boils down ITIL into four key practices that his research shows to bring high value to organizations through a Lean implementation of change control principles.
Number 9, Continuous Delivery.
Continuous Delivery is the book on continuous delivery. It was written by David Farley and Jez Humble. This book is so chock full of practices and principles along with comm antipatterns that it really was useful along that journey.
This book's premise is to design and deploy production ready software with an emphasis on production ready. Release It! has given much of the industry a new vocabulary. Author Michael Nygard provides his designs patterns for stability, security and transparency. It won the Dr. Dobb's Jolt Award for productivity in 2008.
It was written by Jennifer Davis and Katherine Daniels. This features lots of practical advice for organizational alignment in DevOps and it makes sure to fit the cultural aspects alongside the tooling. This book has all the interesting case studies they did.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck authored this seminal work on bringing Lean concepts into software development, and exploring the benefit of value stream mapping and waste reduction. They explain the seven Lean principles applicable to software and cover a wide variety of conceptual tools, along with plenty of examples. This book is the single best introduction to the topic of Lean software.
This book is edited by John Allspaw who gave the groundbreaking 10 Deploys a Day presentation of velocity back in 2009.
This book is a collection of essays from practitioners ranging from monitoring to handling post-mortems to dealing with stability with databases. It also contains medical doctor Richard Cook's amazing paper How Complex Systems Fail.
One book that deserves special mention for enterprises is Gary Gruver and Tommy Mouser's book, Leading The Transformation, Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale.
Number 8, Release It!
This book's premise is to design and deploy production ready software with an emphasis on production ready. Release It! has given much of the industry a new vocabulary. Author Michael Nygard provides his designs patterns for stability, security and transparency. It won the Dr. Dobb's Jolt Award for productivity in 2008.
Number 7, Effective DevOps.
It was written by Jennifer Davis and Katherine Daniels. This features lots of practical advice for organizational alignment in DevOps and it makes sure to fit the cultural aspects alongside the tooling. This book has all the interesting case studies they did.
Number 6, Lean Software Development, An Agile Toolkit.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck authored this seminal work on bringing Lean concepts into software development, and exploring the benefit of value stream mapping and waste reduction. They explain the seven Lean principles applicable to software and cover a wide variety of conceptual tools, along with plenty of examples. This book is the single best introduction to the topic of Lean software.
Number 5, Web Operations
This book is edited by John Allspaw who gave the groundbreaking 10 Deploys a Day presentation of velocity back in 2009. This book is a collection of essays from practitioners ranging from monitoring to handling post-mortems to dealing with stability with databases. It also contains medical doctor Richard Cook's amazing paper How Complex Systems Fail.
Number 4, The Practice of Cloud System Administration
This book, written by Tom Limoncelli is a textbook on system administration topics that continues to be updated.
It has an entire section on DevOps, and is recommend to a sysadmin or ops engineer.
Number 3, The DevOps Handbook
Subtitled, "How to create world-class agility, reliability "and security in technology organizations."
This book is by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis.
It was under development for five years by these leaders of the DevOps movement, and it's the standard reference on DevOps.
Number 2, Leading The Transformation
One book that deserves special mention for enterprises is Gary Gruver and Tommy Mouser's book, Leading The Transformation, Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale.
This is a book for directors, VPs, CTOs, and anyone in charge of leading IT organizational change of any size. Gruver describes leading DevOps transformations at HP in the firmware division for printers, and at the retailer Macy's, both with incredible success.
Number 1, The Phoenix Project
This is the bestselling book by Gene Kim, George Spafford and Kevin Behr. It's a modern retelling of Goldratt's The Goal. This is in a novel format and it walks you through one company's problems and their transformation to Lean and DevOps principles.
