Recommended Books
Core Reading (read in order)
| # |
Book |
Why |
| 1 |
The Linux Command Line — William Shotts |
Free online; best foundation for shell work |
| 2 |
Docker Deep Dive — Nigel Poulton |
Short (200 pages), practical, up-to-date |
| 3 |
Kubernetes in Action (2nd Ed) — Marko Luksa |
The most thorough K8s book; read alongside Phase 1-2 |
| 4 |
The DevOps Handbook — Kim, Humble, Debois, Willis |
Mental model for DevOps culture and flow |
| 5 |
Site Reliability Engineering — Google (free online) |
Core SRE thinking: SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction |
| 6 |
Terraform: Up & Running (3rd Ed) — Yevgeniy Brikman |
Infra-as-code; AWS/GCP/Azure examples |
| 7 |
Observability Engineering — Majors, Fong-Jones, Miranda |
Modern observability beyond metrics |
Supplemental
| Book |
Why |
| Continuous Delivery — Jez Humble, David Farley |
CI/CD pipeline design principles |
| Designing Distributed Systems — Brendan Burns (free PDF from Microsoft) |
Patterns for resilient, scalable systems |
| Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes — Arundel, Domingus |
Practical K8s operations in production |
| The Phoenix Project — Kim, Behr, Spafford |
Fiction; builds intuition for ops culture fast |
| Learning eBPF — Liz Rice |
Advanced Linux observability (save for post-90 days) |
Generated from k8s-docker-plan.md · 8 Oct 2026 16:36
