r/sysadmin · 2023
Most-mentioned books in r/sysadmin during 2023
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/sysadmin within the published source unit for 2023. 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 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.
#5 The Practice of Cloud System Administration
Thomas A. Limoncelli
Limoncelli's Volume 2 on running large distributed web services, the one r/sysadmin keeps listing right next to Volume 1 and rarely talks about on its own.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 The Unicorn Project
Gene Kim
The Phoenix Project retold from the developer's chair: same burning company, different seat at the fire.
#10 Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Charles Petzold
A retired software engineer builds a computer from telegraph relays and flashlights, one chapter at a time, until you understand what a CPU actually does.
#11 Peopleware
Tom DeMarco
A 1987 management book that correctly predicted open-plan offices would destroy developer productivity — and is still being cited to prove it.
#12 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.