7 Essential Devops Books You Must Read to Become A DevOps Expert

1. The DevOps Handbook

Authors: Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Allspaw and John Willis

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability and Security in Technology Organizations book is considered as the DevOps bible by many readers. The authors talk about the importance of implementing DevOps into any organization and how it helps to gain a competitive advantage from the rest. It also talks about the core benefits of DevOps and practical applications of how to adopt DevOps. There are a number of case studies on companies that have done it successfully and how you can implement them into your own organization.

The main takeaways from this book are:

• DevOps culture landscape
• Principles of flow and rapid feedback
• Value stream mapping
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
• DevOps KPI and metrics

2. The Phoenix Project

Authors: Gene Kim

The Phoenix Project book explains the concept of DevOps using a fictional company and fictional employees. The story revolves around Bill, a VP at Parts Unlimited, who has been assigned to fix all of the company’s problems. The company is in a fix and nothing works, including their payment system. Bill starts to identify all of these issues and implement solutions for them. We see throughout the book that these solutions are in fact, DevOps practices. It is an excellent way to understand complex DevOps subject matters in a fun way.

The main takeaways from this book are:

• DevOps core principles explained in a story form
• Allows you to see the problems in a layman’s approach

3. The Unicorn Project

Authors: Gene Kim

The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data book is like a sequel to the Phoenix Project book, but with a different point of view. This time, the main protagonist is Maxine, a developer in the Phoenix Project team. She finds a mentor in Erick who guides her with the five ideals of problem-solving in DevOps.

• Locality and simplicity 
• Focus, flow, and joy 
• Improvement of daily work 
• Psychological safety 
• Customer focus

This book doesn’t require that you read The Phoenix Project beforehand. However, it is highly recommended that you read both books together if you can.

4. Effective DevOps

Authors: Jennifer Davis and Ryn Daniels

The Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale book helps you understand the core culture of DevOps - from empathy to collaboration to just getting people to understand each other to produce efficient results. It essentially talks about the DevOps state of mind and how to accomplish these strategies. It also talks a great deal about getting buy-in from leadership.

The main takeaways from this book are:

• Reducing risks and increasing delivery speed by mitigating deployment errors
• Essential and advanced practices to create CI/CD pipelines 
• Templates and scripts to automate build and deployment procedures

5. Continuous Delivery 

Authors: Jez Humble and David Farley

The Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation book helps you with practical tips and strategies to overcoming obstacles and fixing problems. It goes through the entire CI/CD pipeline in detail and talks about moving things effectively without having to optimize your environment. There are a number of tips and tricks as well in the book that will help you establish better communication among developers, testers, and operations.

The main takeaways from this book are:

• Gets granular in the details of DevOps
• Provides agile methodologies and best practices to implementing DevOps
• Infrastructure management, virtualization, test, and deployment of DevOps

6. The DevOps Adoption Playbook

Authors: Sanjeev Sharma

The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed book breaks down a number of common DevOps myths and shows how it can be efficient for both startups and large enterprises. Because no two teams are alike, the book breaks down how to implement DevOps for different IT operations and software engineering teams. While the implementation can differ for small companies vs big enterprises, the underlying value that DevOps offers cannot be denied. It is a must-read book especially for IT managers, CTOs, or anyone looking to leverage DevOps at the enterprise level. 

The major takeaways from this book are:

• Grasp the full impact of DevOps IT organizations
• Implement DevOps in small and large scale enterprises
• Achieve high-value innovation and optimization with low cost and risk

7.  Accelerate

Authors: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim

The Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations book is based on intense research of capabilities that drive performance in the software development process and delivery performance. There is an in-depth explanation of the four main metrics that drive the overall delivery performance of a software - lead time, mean time to restore (MTTR), deployment frequency and change fail percentage.

The major takeaways from this book are: 

• Continuous Delivery 
• DevOps Architecture 
• Lean Management and Monitoring 

That was all about the top 7 devops books that will help you become a subject expert.

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Going Beyond Books

There is no doubt that learning from DevOps books written by experts will certainly help you excel in your career. However, if you want to gain more in-depth knowledge and a little extra help from classroom-type sessions, opting for a certification course is certainly the way to go. Simplilearn’s Devops Course is designed to help you master the art and science of improving the development and operational activities of your entire team. With case studies and hands-on projects using DevOps tools such as Puppet, SaltStack, and Ansible, you will be able to master DevOps in no time. Sign up for this course today and hop on an exciting career in this new rising field of DevOps.