r/sysadmin · 2019
Most-mentioned books in r/sysadmin during 2019
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/sysadmin 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 Time Management for System Administrators
Thomas A. Limoncelli
A sysadmin who can't ignore his phone reads the one book r/sysadmin keeps recommending to people who are burning out.
#3 The Practice of System and Network Administration
Thomas A. Limoncelli
Thomas Limoncelli's field manual for the sysadmin who wants to stop firefighting and start running a shop that doesn't wake them up at 3 a.m.
#4 The Unicorn Project
Gene Kim
The Phoenix Project retold from the developer's chair: same burning company, different seat at the fire.
#5 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.
#6 The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Fred Brooks spent the 1960s building IBM's OS/360 and wrote down everything that went wrong — in 1975, and it still lands.
#7 UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook
Evi Nemeth
Evi Nemeth's sysadmin bible, now in its fifth edition, covers everything from boot loaders to cloud infrastructure in one dense reference.
#8 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.
#9 Introduction to Algorithms
Thomas H. Cormen
The textbook four MIT professors wrote to settle every algorithms argument, cited by 254 Reddit commenters across 12 subreddits and still going.
#10 Modern Software Engineering
David Farley
Dave Farley argues that software engineering is a discipline with repeatable principles — 73 Reddit threads mostly shrug, then mostly agree.
#11 Never Split the Difference
Chris Voss
A former FBI hostage negotiator teaches the same tactical empathy he used to talk down kidnappers — applied to salary talks, vendor deals, and difficult bosses.
#12 The DevOps Handbook
Gene Kim
Four practitioners codify how Etsy, Netflix, and Google actually ship software — then explain why your org does the opposite.