Reads Worth Their Weight When Moving

This list doesn’t encompass everything I’ve read, mostly just things I’ve read to pick up new skills and my recommendations.

It has two sections:

• The Good Stuff
• Save Your Money

There’s a gray area between the two list, things I wouldn’t actively recommend but didn’t strongly dislike either. I don’t bother including those.

The Good Stuff

Stuff I recommend divided by category.

• Design and Concepts
• Technical Skills
• Fun

Design and Concepts

Books that talk about abstract concepts, system design, and idea worms that’ll have you thinking differently.

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Raymond)

  • The classic scoop on why open-source is kick-butt.

• Clean Code (Martin)

• Clean Architecture (Martin)

  • I continue to revisit this book, and it continues to give me those aHa! moments.

• The Clean Coder

  • Not as much of a page turner as Clean Code and Clean Architecture but glad I listened to it. It was good as an audiobook.

• Clean Agile

  • Listening as audiobook. Seems more like a memoir. I honestly did not absorb this well.

• The Pragmatic Programmer (Thomas and Hunt)

  • Just read in piecemeal. Reread as an audiobook, good the second go around.

• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gamma et al.)

  • Not a particularly fun book IMO, and a little old, but still applicable.

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann)

  • Interesting examination on things like relational databases vs no-sql DBs, reliability vs access, stream vs batch.

• The Twelve Factor App (?)

  • The battle-hardened guidelines.

• Site Reliability Engineering (Murphy, Beyer, et el)

  • This is a slow read.

• The DevOps Handbook (Allspaw et al.)

• Infrastructure as Code 2nd edition (Kief Morris)

• Network Warrior(Gary A. Donahue)

• Observability Engineering(Charity Majors)

• Building Microservices (Sam Newman)

• How to Win Friends and influence People

  • Good as Audio book.

• Principles of Web Design

  • Great primer on web page design, SEO, and page element.

• Building Your Storybrand

  • Simple message, well packaged, method of developing your brand.

• Algorithms to Live by

  • Loved it, new way of thinking about things I encounter on a daily basis.

• Principles of Web Design

  • Loved that it’s essentially a picture book, should have just stole from the library

• Architecture Patterns with Python: Enabling Test-Driven Development, Domain-Driven Design, and Event-Driven Microservices

  • Wish it talked about Django more

• Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith

  • OK, but really enjoyed this books younger (bigger) brother (below)

• Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

  • I actually come back to this book as a reference, I don’t even write microservices

Technical Skills

These were books I read to pick up a new skill.

• Pro Git (Chacon & Straub)

  • Good (free) comprehensive guide everyone who uses Git should read.

• The Kubernetes Book - 2022 edition (Nigel Poulton)

  • Great, up-to-date, core concepts of K8. Good as an ebook.

• Docker Deep Dive (Poulton)

  • Well written coverage of how Docker works under the hood, not a full API/CLI reference but really takes Docker from the abstract to the concrete. Cheap, and gets updates frequently. Good as e-book.

• The C Programming Language (Kernigan and Ritchie)

  • On the back burner, not using C a lot right now.

• The Go Programming Language (Donovan and Kernighan)

  • If Kernighan wrote The C programming Language like this, I see why it’s a classic. Fantastic explainations.

• Unit Testing: Principles, Practices and Patterns (Khorikov)

  • I really apprecaited the section on identifying what makes a quality unit test and doesn’t just push the idea that you should have 100% code coverage.

• Cloud Native Go

  • Great intuitive bits on unique(ish) parts of Go like interfaces and goroutines with a primer on different types of cloud computing

• The Rust Book

  • The self-proclaimed classic intro. Good as an ebook. Will make any programmer think.

• Learning TypeScript

  • Just as long as it needs to be and easy. Good as e-book.

• Go Web Programming (Chang)

  • This was a great intro to web dev with Go’s, but I wish it dealt with more advanced topics.

• Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript

  • This one is on here for sentimental reasons, one of my first hands-on introductions to web development.

• The Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook (Nemeth +)

  • A classic reference to have on hand.

• Introducing Python - Modern Computing in Simple Packages (Lubanovic)

  • Good as an all around reference for the language

• Object-Oriented Python: Master OOP by Building Games and GUIs (Kalb)

  • A great intro to OOP for pythonistas. Made me appreciate interfaces in Golang much more. I skipped the gui/game making sections.

• Rust for Rustaceans (Gjengset)

  • Helped me start contributing quality code, as a collaboator, to my first open source Rust project.

• Javascript - The Definitive Guide (Flanagan)

  • This is a questionable inclusion, the section on the DOM was a little lacking.

• Kubernetes Best Practices (Burns et al)

  • This is a slow read.

• Terraform: up and running (Brikman)

  • Seems a little long, it meanders into thing it should just assume the reader knows, but I like the writing style so far.

• Web Security for Developers: Real Threats, Practical Defense

  • A short, but practical primer. I enjoyed it because it’s a level deeper than common documentation goes

Fun

Fun stuff I just couldn’t leave off the list.

• Team of Rivals - Unabridged (Goodwin)

  • Good as Audiobook

• The Wright Brothers (David McCullough)

• 1776 (David McCullough)

• Storm of Steel (Ernst Jünger)

• How the Internet Happened (Brian McCullough)

  • enjoyable romp through recent history.

• The Phoenix Project (Kim, Behr, & Spafford)

  • Oddly entertaining narative on why devops is beneficial. Would only do as an Audiobook.

• The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)

• The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkien)

• GOT (Martin)

• A short History of Everything

• The Guns of August (Tuchman and Massie)

Save your money

This is books I usually felt that I could have done without, or maybe there was a better place to find the information.

• Most books published by Packt. Their price tags and title are usually enticing but I’ve yet to read one that I thought either didn’t deliver on content or there was a better alternative.

• Python for Devops (Gift et al.)

  • Couldn’t even finish, just ramblings with little useful info on using python for devops or automation that can’t be found in a python 101 book.
  • Alternative: unknown

• Learning React (Banks and Porcello)

  • Plenty of technical mistakes, they must not have run the code they put in the book.
  • Alternative: The React team is putting together more up-to-date docs on using functional components.

• Docker for Developers (Bullington-McGuire et al)

  • Not bad necessarily, but not worth the dosh. I wish I had just went with Docker Deep Dive initially.
  • Alternative: see Docker Deep Dive by Poulton.

• Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Taylor)

  • I have mixed feelings about this one; the shell scripts may be cool, but that doesn’t mean they’ re useful.

• Node.js Cookbook (Griggs)

  • Again, like most books to come out of Packt publishing, it’s not bad but offers little material that you couldn’t just pick up online the documentation.

• Think Java: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

  • I only take issue with the title, which should be “basics of programming with java”. Not bad if that’s what you’re looking for.

• CPython Internals: Your Guide to the Python 3 Interpreter

  • I wanted this to be less abstract. It’s enough for someone more curious, but I wanted more.