Top 10 Books on DevOps You Should Read in 2023
Check out some highly recommended reading material for DevOps operations, and learn how they can support your skills and career prospects.
- DevOps comprises aspects of both development and operations and is a crucial part of today’s software sector, including collaboration, workflows, and deployment.
- In this article, we look at some of the best reading materials to help beginner and intermediate DevOps professionals boost their knowledge and skills.
Top 10 DevOps Books in 2023
Enthusiasts and professionals in the DevOps field often turn to literature resources to develop a good understanding of DevOps practices. Let us look at some of the most authoritative resources on embracing DevOps with the ideal knowledge base for your career.
1. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations, 2nd Edition
This highly recommended, bestselling book is a great resource for IT professionals looking to gain expertise in the integration of operations and development approaches. It is a detailed guide on the various aspects of DevOps for beginners, including Agile primer and lean manufacturing.
The second edition of this book covers new research and a new range of case studies from major organizations such as the U.S. Airforce, Adidas, and Target that will help professionals practically handle common problems.
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2. The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise
This book by Jennifer Davis comprehensively covers DevOps culture, including the importance of empathy, developing connections, supporting teamwork, breaking down silos, and more.
It covers DevOps professionals’ most common challenges while giving practical strategies to improve continuous improvement, collaboration, and automation.
3. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
This book by Jennifer Davis comprehensively covers DevOps culture, including the importance of empathy, developing connections, supporting teamwork, breaking down silos, and more.
It is a great source for practical strategies for DevOps beginners to bolster collaboration, optimize tool usage, and troubleshoot problems and misunderstandings that are fairly common across organizations.
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4. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
One of the most popular books on DevOps, The Phoenix Project, is a unique guide on critical DevOps principles covered through a fictional narrative. The story talks about the journey of Bill, an overwhelmed IT manager, and how he overcomes his organization’s challenges with DevOps methodologies.
With a compelling story, the book expounds on essential aspects of DevOps with real-world scenarios and is key to any beginner who wants to learn the ins and outs of DevOps implementation.
5. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
Written by Jez Humble and David Farley, Continuous Delivery exhaustively covers every aspect of continuous integration and continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD). It gives readers several strategies for generating optimized and automated software delivery pipelines.
The book primarily focuses on the importance of continuous feedback and is a good source to learn about compliance, audits, zero-downtime releases, configuration management strategies, and more.
6. The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
A sequel to the Phoenix Project, this book is another compelling fictional narrative, this time following Maxine, a developer from the Phoenix Project. It takes the reader through her journey of implementing key DevOps principles to optimize essential organizational processes.
The author has focused on the necessary but not always visible structures for engineering and the issues arising from project complexity and technical debt. It is a good idea to check out both books of the series together.
7. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations
The authors of this book provide readers with a guide to data-driven DevOps with exhaustive research, including surveys with thousands of organizations. The book focuses on the essential capabilities characteristic of leading technology organizations.
The book provides comprehensive coverage of key aspects, including lead time, change fail percentage, mean time to restore, and deployment frequency through discussions on continuous delivery, DevOps architecture, and lean management and monitoring.
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8. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
This book is not a conventional handbook but compiles several essays by various existing and former Google SRE members. While a significant portion of the book is based on Google, it provides unique insights into DevOps problem-solving methodologies.
Based on Google’s site reliability engineering practices, this book provides invaluable insights into managing large-scale systems and achieving high availability. It covers essential topics such as service level objectives, error budgets, and effective incident management, making it a must-read for any DevOps practitioner.
9. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
It is a good guide for professionals of all levels. It helps readers learn to manage interruptions, remove time wastage, keep up with calendars, and automation of processes for faster automation.
10. Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
The book discusses and covers the impact of critical facets, including team size, mutual trust, cognitive load, handoffs, and considering teams as the primary unit instead of individuals.
Mastering DevOps is a journey that requires continuous exploration and learning, and these resources can prove invaluable in offering insights and guidance for those looking to embrace success in the environment of agile development in their organizations.
What book do you think is a good source of learning on DevOps? Share your thoughts with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image sources: Shutterstock, Amazon.com
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