Until earlier this year, I’d almost never read a book for fun. I still remember enjoying Of Mice and Men and an Inspector Calls for GCSE English, but do we really count that?
I’ve read tens of thousands of vendor documentation and study guides, but an actual book? Nah, not for me. When I’d tried, I’d found it a bit too easy to get lost in the lists of books people recommend that are kinda related to what I want to learn, but not enough for me to actually enjoy it. Hopefully, this article will change things for you! Without further ado, here’s each one:
Site Reliability Engineering & The Site Reliability Workbook - O’Reilly #
The Holy Books of SRE. These are Less New Testament/Old Testament and more splitting it into 2 so they’re easier to palette. While they are two separate books indeed, they’re both absolutely essential reading to get into Site Reliability Engineering. If you can only read one of them, I’d go with the latter if you know the fundamentals but haven’t had much exposure on how to apply them yet, and the former if you’ve not grasped the fundamentals just yet.
Just to note that while Google products are used in almost every example, you don’t have to have used Google Cloud or really anything Google-related for the book to still apply fully into your role. I’ve not touched GCP in years, but I still apply knowledge from these books daily if not hourly.
How Big Things Get Done - Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner #
This one’s unique to me, but I still think it could be a beneficial read to most that haven’t had much exposure to the project management side. In particular, it’s helped me abstract some of my thinking regarding projects to more closely understand what customers want as an end goal and work towards that rather than trying to fit a problem-sized shape into a solution-sized hole automatically. It’s heavily genericized, with the majority of the book not even mentioning IT, yet almost everything in there can relate to how you think about tackling any larger piece of work.
How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie #
I’ll discuss this in my next article about some lessons I’ve learned as an SRE, but this book is incredibly important if you weren’t blessed with a social battery as large as your technical expertise. I wasn’t, and while I’d managed and learned behaviours over the years, Dale Carnegie’s work has helped me establish those learned behaviours as truly a part of my being. If you don’t get what I mean, read the damn book! Seriously, if you think that all you need is for people to listen to you, this book will help you get to where you want to be.