r/devops · 2019
Most-mentioned books in r/devops during 2019
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/devops within the published source unit for 2019. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.
#1 The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim
An IT manager inherits a failing project, a mutinous ops team, and a CEO deadline — and has to ship before the company does.
#2 The DevOps Handbook
Gene Kim
Four practitioners codify how Etsy, Netflix, and Google actually ship software — then explain why your org does the opposite.
#3 The Unicorn Project
Gene Kim
The Phoenix Project retold from the developer's chair: same burning company, different seat at the fire.
#4 Design Patterns
Erich Gamma
The 1994 Gang of Four catalog that named 23 object-oriented patterns, gave developers a shared vocabulary, and taught a generation to over-apply both.
#5 TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1
W. Richard Stevens
W. Richard Stevens wrote 24 Reddit-cited pages per year's worth of networking protocol detail so you'd stop guessing what's on the wire.
#6 Code Complete
Steve McConnell
Steve McConnell's 900-page construction manual for software, ranked third on Reddit's canonical reading list and still cited 25 years after publication.
#7 Continuous Delivery
Jez Humble
The 2010 Humble-Farley textbook that turned "ship when it's done" into a measurable engineering discipline with pipelines, gates, and deployment rings.
#8 Programming Pearls
Jon Bentley
Jon Bentley's 1986 column collection teaches you to shrink a 75,000-word dictionary into a Bloom filter and estimate anything — one problem at a time.
#9 Refactoring
Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler's catalog of named moves for cleaning up code that already works, cited 116 times across Reddit in 7 years as the Clean Code alternative people actually prefer.
#10 Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud
Brendan Gregg
Brendan Gregg's 800-page field manual for diagnosing CPU, memory, disk, and network bottlenecks on Linux and cloud systems.
#11 The C Programming Language
Brian W. Kernighan
The 1978 book that defined C's syntax, co-written by its creator, still cited by name 281 times across Reddit in 7 years.
#12 The Pragmatic Programmer
Andy Hunt
Two veterans hand you a checklist for the craft: don't write code you don't need, own your tools, and fix the broken window before someone else does.