10 Must Read Devops Books in 2025
These DevOps books will help you gain a better understanding of what DevOps is, why it matters, and how to get started. These are in my personal opinion are the best books that you should read in 2025.
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1. Beyond the Phoenix Project: The Origins and Evolution of DevOps
Authors: Gene Kim and John Willis
Year: February 2018
Gene Kim, award-winning CTO, and researcher, and John Willis, evangelist at Docker Inc, share their foundational knowledge of DevOps here.
In Beyond the Phoenix Project, you can read about the pivotal figures, philosophies, and the Learning Organization concept that differentiate the DevOps approach from other IT methodologies.
2. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
Authors: Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debios, and John Willis
Year: November 2021
This influential must-read is ideal for everyone in DevOps, from developers and operations teams to IT managers and platform owners.
In this new edition, you’ll learn about 15 case studies of companies that have realized the benefits of DevOps (including Adidas, Fannie Mae, and the US Air Force), as well as best practices to help you implement it in your own organization.
You’ll learn about rapid feedback and flow, DevOps KPIs and metrics to measure, value stream mapping, and understanding your CI/CD pipeline.
3. The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Authors: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
Year: January 2013
This classic takes an unconventional story approach to explore the core principles of DevOps and how they look and work in real life. The story follows Bill, VP of IT at Parts Unlimited.
Bill and his team are well over budget and time with their new IT initiative, the Phoenix Project — although the system remains unusable. They have 90 days to fix the mess or their entire department will be outsourced.
During this timeline, Bill and his team present the reader with various challenges, DevOps use cases, and best practices for adopting and optimizing a DevOps culture.
4. The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise
Author: Sanjeev Sharma
Year: February 2017
In this DevOps 2017 Book of the Year, you will discover how to experiment and apply DevOps best practices at the enterprise level.
Using his experience leading IBM’s DevOps practice, Sanjeev Sharma shares actionable advice. He acknowledges the risks, limitations, opportunities, and challenges of implementing DevOps in large organizations.
He then discusses cultural, tooling, organizational, and other changes you can make immediately to improve your engineering innovation velocity.
5. The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction
Author: William Shotts
Year: 2009 (New Edition in March 2019)
The Linux Command Line presents practical knowledge in short and sweet chapters, describing how to use the most popular operating system for DevOps engineers; Linux.
This book teaches you how to automate repetitive tasks using shell scripts, write programs in Bash, edit files with Vi, and more, including creating, deleting, and cleaning directories, symlinks, and files.
Should you prefer, combine this read with Evi Nemeth’s UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (Fifth Edition).
Books on DevOps Culture
6. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
Author: John Doerr
Year: April 2018
Before he became the legendary venture capitalist he is today, John Doerr was an engineer at Intel in the 1970s. During his time there, he worked under the legendary Andy Grove, learning the art and science of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
This approach is a goal-setting system that helps companies of all sizes prioritize where to direct their resources, track progress, and fail fast within a given time frame.
The book shares case studies of how the system has worked at bleeding-edge IT companies like Google and Microsoft so you can see its practical application.
7. Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
Author: L. David Marquet
Year: May 2013
A key characteristic of DevOps is its emphasis on sharing responsibilities while preventing silos from forming.
Developers and operations engineers used to work as separate teams, but DevOps encourages them to collaborate continuously, along with your leadership and the software customer.
You can accomplish this by empowering your technicians to make decisions before it is too late. Turn the Ship Around is a story-based guide to delegating, mentoring, and leading flawless operations while boosting team morale, performance, and talent retention.
8. DevOps for the Modern Enterprise: Winning Practices to Transform Legacy IT Organizations
Author: Mirco Hering
Year: April 2018
While many DevOps books focus on the right tooling and methods, Mirco’s guide emphasizes the people aspect of maintaining high-performing IT systems.
He insists that cultural change is the most impactful initiative, yet the toughest to pull off. So, he shares practical insights on how to facilitate an enabling ecosystem for your engineers to thrive and propel your organization’s initiatives to success.
The perfect read for companies eager to transform their cultures from legacy to bleeding-edge.
9. Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale
Authors: Gary Gruver and Tommy Mouser
Year: August 2015
IT leaders at large organizations often struggle with determining which changes to prioritize to inspire continuous improvement.
Leading the Transformation provides the execution plan your leadership needs to create, implement, and track the progress of your modern DevOps framework across teams and departments.
The book emphasizes how to coordinate work across various players — including the culture to support this transformation.
10. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Authors: Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Year: June 2014
Engineering and leaders who want to break out of traditional thinking and adopt working techniques in a rapidly changing world will find this 30th Edition of the 1984 classic compulsive reading.
Engineers will recognize real-life struggles in the thriller-style narrative, but will also glean insights into the best way to turn failing initiatives into thriving operations a day at a time.
These books are very easy to read and straightforward, so pick one of them (I’d go through the list in a numerical order) and start learning! try reading at least 10 pages per day. shouldn’t be that hard ;)
Aff: for every book you buy, I get a small help :)
Happy reading!
