Book Reviews

5 #DevOps Books I plan to finish this year

New Year. Resolutions, etc. 🙂

I’m notoriously bad about starting a book and never finishing it, particularly when it’s a technical book. My goal this year is to finish the following 5 books:

	The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations Gene Kim is perhaps best known for his novel “The Phoenix Project”, which lays out the fundamental precepts for DevOps. The Handbook (by Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, and Jez Humble) gets great reviews, and I think it does a good job of translating theory into practice. I’ve only finished about a third of it, so I’ve still got a lot of reading left to do, but I hope to finish it soon.
	Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems This one might be a little easier to cheat on my goal; I’ve already read most of it. It’s a collection of papers written by various SRE’s within Google, and gives some great insights into their vision of applying developmental principles to operation problems. While it could be argued that the SRE model is distinct from DevOps, there’s enough overlap that it makes sense to apply these techniques to my DevOps study.
	Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story This one’s a bit of a stretch for most DevOps folks, but if you think of it an approach to personal continual improvements, then it makes sense why this book belongs in a DevOps collection. I started reading this one last year, and quickly off the bandwagon. My goal is to try and finish it by the middle of the year, and hopefully begin to apply some of the principles to my personal and professional challenges.
	The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources in the Cloud I heard John Willis at DevOpsDays Nashville this year, and he recommended following and reading John Allspaw (among other people); the second edition of this book is coming out this year, so I’ll probably wait till it arrives. While I don’t do much with either web or cloud development, the principles of scaling is relevant to all kinds of applications.
	Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World Damon Edwards actually recommended this book during a webcast I saw a couple of months ago, and while it’s not a technical book, it speaks to the art of transforming a large, complex organization with entrenched policies into a nimble, responsive team. Brownfield to greenfield (with military references).

#DevOps Two Books for Operations

Over the last couple years, there’s been a subtle shift in my responsibilities at my day job (and my interests in technology overall). I’ve been doing much less database development and administration work, and more general system architecture work. That’s harder to write up in blog posts than SQL code, so I’ve struggled with writing, but I want to get back into the habit. So excuse the choppiness, and let me try to put some thoughts on digital paper.

I’m pushing very hard for my company to adopt DevOps principles. There’s a lot of material out there about DevOps from the developer perspective, but there’s few resources for those of us on the operations side of the house. In a pure sense, there’s no such thing as sides, but in a regulated industry like healthcare or financial services, old walls are tough to break down, so they’re useful as organizational frameworks for general responsibilities. However, we are all developers, whether or not we sling code or manage infrastructure as code; the goal is to produce repeatable patterns and tools that allow growth and change.

Two great books that I’m reading right now are:

The Practice of Cloud System Administration by Limoncelli, Chalup, and Hogan. Tons of practical advice for building large-scale distributed processing systems, and DevOps philosophy is woven throughout (and specifically highlighted in Chapter 8). This is one of those books that you’ll feel like diving in on some sections, and skimming over others; it’s a through examination of system administration from development through implementation, so there’s lots of conceptual hooks to grab hold of (and conversely, things that you may not have experienced).

The second book that I’ve recently started reading is Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. This book is a collection of essays which explore Google’s method of approaching reliability; like most things Google, Site Reliability Engineering is similar to DevOps, but specific to the ways that Google does thing. It’s also light on documentation (insert joke about Google and beta products here). However, it does offer several insights into day-to-day system administration at Google. While the SRE model is not exactly like DevOps, there’s lots of overlap, and differences may be attributed more to practice than to concepts.

More to come.

2016-08-30 by Stuart Ainsworth Blogging is FUN! Book Reviews DevOps 0

My reading list…

OK, so I haven’t blogged in like, forever… (and apparently, I’ve adopted the speech pattern of a teenager from the 80’s while I was away). Suffice it to say that I’ve been working on a few major projects, and I’ll fill you in on them later. I did want to pick up the torch again, and thought I would write a quick email about the three books that are currently on my reading list:

On my iPad (and no, I didn’t get a Surface RT, and it sounds like it was a good thing I waited), I recently picked up Managing Humans by Michael Lopp. It’s a fun read, but his principles and axioms are a bit like the Book of Proverbs; it’s a loose collection of ideas on how to manage software engineers. I’m a bit more simplistic than he is, and it’s tough for me to put all of the puzzle pieces together. I’m still digging my way through it; it’s fun at times.

My technical book of choice as of late is Practical PowerPivot & DAX Formulas for Excel 2010 by Art Tennick. We’ve got a new self-service BI initiative at work, and my department is responsible for evangelizing the capabilities of SQL Server. What I’ve seen so far of PowerPivot, I like, but there are a few challenges; I’m not an Excel guy, and so the interface is not intuitive for a DBA. This particular book has been helpful on more than one occasion when I’ve been frustrated by my lack of ability to get the software to do what I want.

And now for pure geekiness (and I’m sure my wife is shaking her head at this one), I recently found the entire Apprentice Adept series from Piers Anthony in a used bookstore. This was one of my favorites in my early high school career (yep, I was a nerd), and I just started reading Split Infinity. My excuse is that I bought it for my teenage daughter, but in reality, its for me Smile .

2012-10-30 by Stuart Ainsworth Blogging is FUN! Book Reviews 1

Announcing AtlantaMDF Reviews

Just a quick post to tout a recent sister site that I’ve started (with the help of several other AtlantaMDF members): AtlantaMDF Reviews. Our goal is to provide a forum of book and tool reviews that would be of interest to our local PASS user group.

The site has just started, with only 2 brief reviews as of this date. However, we’ve got several people working behind the scenes reading and reviewing new material so that we can begin posting several articles soon (BTW, if you’re an AtlantaMDF attendee and would like to contribute, please find me and let me know).

Anyway, if you’re a Google Reader user, here’s a button for you to add the feed to your collection. If you’re not a Google Reader user, the feedburner URL is below. Keep your eyes open for new material soon:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AtlantaMDFReviews

2009-05-26 by Stuart Ainsworth Blogging is FUN! Book Reviews Education SQLServerPedia Syndication The Social Web 0

SQL Server 2006 DBA Street Smarts – Joseph L. Jorden

Welcome to my first book review! As part of the process of arranging for swag for SQLSaturday, I’ve encountered a number of publishers that have agreed to donate books to our event in exchange for book reviews. Obviously, they’d like favorable reviews, but I don’t feel obligated to hold back any legitimate criticisms that I may have of their material. I do think this is a good opportunity to expand my own writing skills, plus encourage me to read more.

I’ve been studing for my MCITP: Database Administrator exams for some time; I picked up Jorden’s Street Smarts a while back, and have slowly been easing my way through it. other things seem to occupy my time, so I’ve been unable to fully commit to taking the exam. However, that’s no fault of the author. He does a great job of simplifying the material that will be covered on the Microsoft exam 70-431, and it really is framed in terms of common “street” scenarios that a typical DBA might encounter.

The book is laid out in four phases: Installation and Configuration, Implementing High Availability, Maintaining and Automating, and finally, Monitoring and Troubleshooting. Each phase is comprised of tasks; for every task, there’s a description of a plausible scenario, followed by a step-by-step explanation of how to do the task using SQL Server Management Studio. There’s lots of pictures (probably because the exam emphasises the use of the GUI), and it’s a very easy read. Unfortunately, there’s only so much you can do to make this material exciting. As a development-oriented DBA, I’ve been sitting for months on the second section (mainly because it’s the stuff I don’t do on a day-to-day basis anymore), and even now, I’m dreading cracking it back open again.

The book is well-written, and if I were more enthralled with the material, I think I would actually enjoy using it as a study guide. It’s better than many other certification books I’ve encountered, because I think the author really tries to use examples that are realistic (rather than simply trying to teach the test). If you’re looking to upgrade from a SQL Server 2000 MCDBA to the MCTS SQL Server 2005 cert, this is a good place to start.

2009-02-12 by Stuart Ainsworth Book Reviews Certification 0

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