The DevOps Handbook book review

This book actually reminds me of the book “Release it ” but with much less emphasis on actual technical patterns but with a stronger accent on soft skills.

It’s also complimentary to the “Phoenix Project” written by the same authors.

If you’ve skipped the “Phoenix Project” or you don’t like to read the novels, like I do, I would recommend you to start with this book as it has much more momentum than the first book.

It has a bunch of great inspiring examples of successes from the companies that have embarked on the “DevOps journey” which to me is the best part of this book. Also the book is relatively recent therefore a lot of its advices are quite innovative and might be even disturbing to some.

My score 4/5

Sometimes I’m late for some of the most important events in my life. Hopefully, health is not the issue that I’ve missed. Self-awareness and consciousness have always been a nice thing to have under your belt.

This book helps to improve those skills by giving you a nice reference for all the good things you need to be aware of that might either help you to advance or suffer as a human being.

This book is nothing more than a composition of blog posts, though it gives your a nice system as a set of goals you can follow along with a companion mobile app. In my opinion, it’s much nicer to have good ideas under one cover than scattered around the Internet.

My score 4/5 due to how actual this topic is for myself

“Release it” book review

There’s a relatively short list of books I would like to keep on my desk. Most often those books are references and a composition of famous quotes. After I’ve read this chap I’d like to have it on my work desk at any moment.

This book is a perfect mix of lots of useful technical insights, practices and recommendations got from the author’s hard-earned experience combined with some of the soft-skills you need to make your software and its maintenance (which as the author states costs more than the initial 1.0 version) as smooth as possible with as much of interrupted sleep as you could possibly get.

The book is definitely outdated, some of the references to particular technologies look odd and obvious (if not even funny). Nevertheless, I will put this book in one row with the “SRE book” & “Project Phoenix” as it combines them both.

My score is 5/5

The phoenix project book review

That was the first non-technical book I’ve read for the last few years. At first I was really struggling to go through the first one hundred pages as I was constantly bored due to absolute lack of any technical details. However, a good book is always a good book even though it’s an IT-concerned novel.

What I like in this book is how it reminds some of the actual projects I’ve worked. I’m not sure whether the final solution that this book presents will be suitable for anyone but still it gives a lot of food for thought how to improve the inner processes and the workflow in any IT organization. If you like “The Deadline” by Tom DeMarco you would love this book.

My score is 3/5, simply because I don’t like novels.

Ansible for DevOps book review

I was given this book, which is an uncommon event for me as I usually buy all books by myself. Moreover, I was given a paper version of the book.

Therefore, there were absolutely no regrets regarding this book =) The book is concise and covers almost all parts of Ansible I’ve ever heard of. The only exception was the case when you need to deal with a server that’s under a jump host/bastion, which is very common for cloud deployments as they usually are done in a VPC network of some kind that not exposed to the outer world.

This book has plenty of handful examples, but the most useful thing in it were not them.  The book covers some of the most undervalued parts of the Ansible ecosystem: Ansible Galaxy, Tower and it also has a decent set of invaluable pattern and best practices for writing your playbooks.

My score: 5/5, I’m not sure if you need to read anything more than this book if you plan to use Ansible professionally.

 

Puppet Essentials book review

The book provides only a shallow knowledge of Puppet, doesn’t cover some of the most important modules you’ll need in the real world as well as it doesn’t provide practical examples.

I will recommend it only if you need to quickly brush up the technical details of Puppet’s architecture or you need to start using it quickly rather than spending some time on playing with examples its documentation provides

My score: 3/5