r/sysadmin · 2022

Most-mentioned books in r/sysadmin during 2022

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/sysadmin within the published source unit for 2022. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

Books ranked

Tracked mentions in 2022

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

30 in 2022

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 2022

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.

4 in 2022

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 in 2022

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.

2 in 2022

Network Warrior

Gary A. Donahue

Gary Donahue's field manual for the network engineer who inherits a closet full of Cisco gear and has to keep packets moving by Monday.

2 in 2022

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.

2 in 2022

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 2022

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.

2 in 2022

#10

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.

2 in 2022

#11

The Practice of Network Security Monitoring

Richard Bejtlich

Richard Bejtlich's field manual for catching intruders by watching the wire, built around Security Onion and the assumption that prevention will fail.

2 in 2022

#12

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 2022

#13

Accelerate

Nicole Forsgren

Four researchers measure what actually makes software teams fast, and the findings keep getting cited against companies mistaking speed for shortcuts.

1 in 2022

#14

Practical Packet Analysis

Chris Sanders

Chris Sanders walks you through Wireshark captures of real attacks, slow networks, and broken handshakes until the protocol stack stops being abstract.

1 in 2022

#15

TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1

W. Richard Stevens

You run tcpdump on a mystery connection and finally understand every line it prints, packet by packet.

1 in 2022

#16

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 2022