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r/sysadmin · 2020

Most-mentioned books in r/sysadmin during 2020

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/sysadmin within the published source unit for 2020. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

12
Books ranked
50
Tracked mentions in 2020
Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions
Cover of The Phoenix Project #1

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim

A struggling IT VP inherits a doomed project, a company on the edge of collapse, and one coworker who has quietly become the company's entire bottleneck.

14 in 2020
Cover of Time Management for System Administrators #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.

11 in 2020
Cover of The Practice of System and Network Administration #3

The Practice of System and Network Administration

Thomas A. Limoncelli

One r/sysadmin comment tells you to buy this on the company card before you touch a single production server.

7 in 2020
Cover of The Unicorn Project #4

The Unicorn Project

Gene Kim

A senior engineer gets exiled to a doomed payroll project and finds a rogue skunkworks team racing to save the company's flagship app before the deadline kills it.

7 in 2020
Cover of The DevOps Handbook #5

The DevOps Handbook

Gene Kim

Why a company doing 10,000 deploys a day breaks less often than one doing four a year, and what it takes to get from the second number to the first.

2 in 2020
Cover of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck #6

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson

Mark Manson's case that choosing what to care about is the only self-help move that actually matters.

2 in 2020
Cover of UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook #7

UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook

Evi Nemeth

A five-edition reference guide sysadmins have called 'the bible' since Evi Nemeth wrote the first one in 1989.

2 in 2020
Cover of Code Complete #8

Code Complete

Steve McConnell

Steve McConnell's seven-hundred-page argument that construction, not design or testing, is where most software quality is actually won or lost.

1 in 2020
Cover of The C Programming Language #9

The C Programming Language

Brian W. Kernighan

Two authors write the book that becomes 'K&R,' and forty years later Reddit still uses it as shorthand for programmers who had to know everything themselves.

1 in 2020
Cover of The First 90 Days #10

The First 90 Days

Michael D. Watkins

You start a new job Monday with a boss expecting results by day thirty, and this book is the plan for those three months.

1 in 2020
Cover of The Mythical Man-Month #11

The Mythical Man-Month

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Fred Brooks managed IBM's late-1960s OS/360 project, then wrote the book explaining why adding more programmers only made it later.

1 in 2020
Cover of The Practice of Cloud System Administration #12

The Practice of Cloud System Administration

Thomas A. Limoncelli

Limoncelli's sequel to the sysadmin bible, rebuilt for teams who rent their servers by the hour instead of racking them.

1 in 2020