Here are 43 books that Release It! fans have personally recommended if you like Release It!. Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Mariano Anaya Author Of Clean Code in Python

From my list on building high-quality enterprise software.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a software engineer because I’m a builder at heart. I have always had a profoundly curious mind, and always enjoyed tinkering. So at one point in my life, it became evident that I was going to be an engineer. I consider teaching the final step of learning, so whether this means writing an article or giving a talk, or simply sharing recommendations, I make a final effort to share with the community of like-minded people what I have learnt. For this reason, I hope you enjoy reading my book and the ones I recommended.

Mariano's book list on building high-quality enterprise software

Mariano Anaya Why Mariano loves this book

I’ve found in this book many useful topics about low-level design which connected with my first recommendation (Code Complete). For instance, about creating functions not only as a tactic for reusing code, but more as a way to give clear meaning to parts of the code, and make it more readable. I was happy to find in these authors ideas I have been agreeing with for a long time.

Then there’s also the fact that this book provides several examples with code on how to make the design simpler to maintain, and clearly illustrates the S.O.L.I.D. principles.

By Robert Martin ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Clean Code as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Even bad code can function. But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Noted software expert Robert C. Martin presents a revolutionary paradigm with Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code "on the fly" into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a…


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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Book cover of Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

Mariano Anaya Author Of Clean Code in Python

From my list on building high-quality enterprise software.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a software engineer because I’m a builder at heart. I have always had a profoundly curious mind, and always enjoyed tinkering. So at one point in my life, it became evident that I was going to be an engineer. I consider teaching the final step of learning, so whether this means writing an article or giving a talk, or simply sharing recommendations, I make a final effort to share with the community of like-minded people what I have learnt. For this reason, I hope you enjoy reading my book and the ones I recommended.

Mariano's book list on building high-quality enterprise software

Mariano Anaya Why Mariano loves this book

I've found this book enlightening in many key areas of software development, and as I was reading it, I felt connected with the author (even though I've never met him, I could imagine us having a conversation about software engineering, and agreeing on pretty much everything).

It was a revealing book for me, in the sense that it gave a formal framework to several ideas I've noticed as a practitioner over the years. In that regard, I wish I'd come across this work way earlier in my career.

By Steve McConnell ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Code Complete as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Widely considered one of the best practical guides to programming, Steve McConnell's original CODE COMPLETE has been helping developers write better software for more than a decade. Now this classic book has been fully updated and revised with leading-edge practices-and hundreds of new code samples-illustrating the art and science of software construction. Capturing the body of knowledge available from research, academia, and everyday commercial practice, McConnell synthesizes the most effective techniques and must-know principles into clear, pragmatic guidance. No matter what your experience level, development environment, or project size, this book will inform and stimulate your thinking-and help you build…


Book cover of Kubernetes in Action

Magnus Larsson Author Of Microservices with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud: Build resilient and scalable microservices using Spring Cloud, Istio, and Kubernetes

From my list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.

Magnus' book list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices

Magnus Larsson Why Magnus loves this book

Kubernetes is the go-to tool for orchestrating a landscape of cooperating microservices, making it a crucial skill to master.

This book guided me through Kubernetes, from the basics, such as pods, services, and deployments, to more advanced topics, like its inner workings and auto-scaling resources. What I particularly appreciate is the balance between theory and practical examples, reinforced by exercises with GitHub-hosted source code, which I also found helpful as a starting point for building real-world applications.

By Marko Luksa ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Kubernetes in Action as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Description

With Kubernetes, users don't have to worry about which specific machine in their data center their application is running on. Each layer in their application is decoupled from other layers so they can scale, update, and maintain them independently.

Kubernetes in Action teaches developers how to use Kubernetes to deploy self-healing scalable distributed applications. By the end, readers will be able to build and deploy applications in a proper way to take full advantage of the Kubernetes platform.

Key features

* Easy to follow guide

* Hands-on examples

* Clearly-written

Audience

The book is for both application developers as…


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Book cover of The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More: A Great Wharf Novel

The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More by Meredith Marple,

The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.

Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…

Book cover of A Philosophy of Software Design

Mariano Anaya Author Of Clean Code in Python

From my list on building high-quality enterprise software.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a software engineer because I’m a builder at heart. I have always had a profoundly curious mind, and always enjoyed tinkering. So at one point in my life, it became evident that I was going to be an engineer. I consider teaching the final step of learning, so whether this means writing an article or giving a talk, or simply sharing recommendations, I make a final effort to share with the community of like-minded people what I have learnt. For this reason, I hope you enjoy reading my book and the ones I recommended.

Mariano's book list on building high-quality enterprise software

Mariano Anaya Why Mariano loves this book

I have to be honest here: when I was reading this book on a trip to New York, I found myself quite surprised because I had seen so many praises for this book, yet I did not particularly agree with most of the topics I was reading about. In particular, I found several points that contradicted those in Clean Code and Code Complete.

I know there’s a debate going on between the authors on a distribution list, but besides some of these points on which I respectfully disagree with the author, I can see is a book of immense value, and there are tons of other great points made about great software design (for example, ”modules should be deep”). And the explanations are crystal clear.

A final reason for recommending this book is that it’s always enriching to expose oneself to a different viewpoint.

By John K. Ousterhout ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked A Philosophy of Software Design as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book addresses the topic of software design: how to decompose complex software systems into modules (such as classes and methods) that can be implemented relatively independently. The book first introduces the fundamental problem in software design, which is managing complexity. It then discusses philosophical issues about how to approach the software design process and it presents a collection of design principles to apply during software design. The book also introduces a set of red flags that identify design problems. You can apply the ideas in this book to minimize the complexity of large software systems, so that you can…


Book cover of Kafka in Action

Magnus Larsson Author Of Microservices with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud: Build resilient and scalable microservices using Spring Cloud, Istio, and Kubernetes

From my list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.

Magnus' book list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices

Magnus Larsson Why Magnus loves this book

Apache Kafka is the industry standard for real-time event streaming, an essential component for large-scale, high-performance microservice ecosystems.

Despite being new to Kafka when I read this book, it quickly brought me up to speed on key concepts that underpin its scalability and real-time capabilities, such as the commit log, topic partitions, and consumer groups. The book also introduces other critical Kafka features like the schema registry, Kafka Connect, and stream processing with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB. The practical examples provided were straightforward to apply and adapt to my own use cases.

By Dylan Scott , Viktor Gamov , Dave Klein

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Kafka in Action as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Kafka in Action is a practical, hands-on guide to building Kafka-based data pipelines. Filled with real-world use cases and scenarios, this book probes Kafka's most common use cases, ranging from simple logging through managing streaming data systems for message routing, analytics, and more.

In systems that handle big data, streaming data, or fast data, it's important to get your data pipelines right. Apache Kafka is a wicked-fast distributed streaming platform that operates as more than just a persistent log or a flexible message queue.

Key Features

* Understanding Kafka's concepts

* Implementing Kafka as a message queue

* Setting up…


Book cover of Learning OpenTelemetry: Setting Up and Operating a Modern Observability System

Magnus Larsson Author Of Microservices with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud: Build resilient and scalable microservices using Spring Cloud, Istio, and Kubernetes

From my list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.

Magnus' book list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices

Magnus Larsson Why Magnus loves this book

Understanding how requests and messages traverse a large microservice landscape is notoriously challenging. The CNCF OpenTelemetry framework standardizes how to collect and observe telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces).

This book was invaluable in helping me grasp OpenTelemetry’s core concepts and architecture, including collectors and exporters, and how to instrument applications effectively. It also helped me understand how distributed tracing data is structured into traces and spans and how to propagate context information between cooperating microservices.

By Ted Young , Austin Parker ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Learning OpenTelemetry as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

OpenTelemetry is a revolution in observability data. Instead of running multiple uncoordinated pipelines, OpenTelemetry provides users with a single integrated stream of data, providing multiple sources of high-quality telemetry data: tracing, metrics, logs, RUM, eBPF, and more. This practical guide shows you how to set up, operate, and troubleshoot the OpenTelemetry observability system.

Authors Austin Parker, head of developer relations at Lightstep and OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, and Ted Young, cofounder of the OpenTelemetry project, cover every OpenTelemetry component, as well as observability best practices for many popular cloud, platform, and data services such as Kubernetes and AWS Lambda. You'll learn…


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Book cover of That First Heady Burn

That First Heady Burn by George Bixley,

Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…

Book cover of Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith

Magnus Larsson Author Of Microservices with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud: Build resilient and scalable microservices using Spring Cloud, Istio, and Kubernetes

From my list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.

Magnus' book list on mastering Java and Spring-based microservices

Magnus Larsson Why Magnus loves this book

No matter how advanced our tools for developing resilient and scalable microservices become, the million-dollar question remains: How do we effectively break up a monolith into microservices?

This book offers excellent guidance on this challenge. I found its starting point grounded in Domain-Driven Design and its concepts like Bounded Contexts and Aggregates particularly valuable. These concepts are key to mapping microservices to a real-world domain model. I also appreciate Sam’s advice, to begin with a few relatively large microservices aligned with Bounded Contexts and only break them into smaller services when there’s a clear business case for doing so.

By Sam Newman ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Monolith to Microservices as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How do you detangle a monolithic system and migrate it to a microservice architecture? How do you do it while maintaining business-as-usual? As a companion to Sam Newman's extremely popular Building Microservices, this new book details a proven method for transitioning an existing monolithic system to a microservice architecture.

With many illustrative examples, insightful migration patterns, and a bevy of practical advice to transition your monolith enterprise into a microservice operation, this practical guide covers multiple scenarios and strategies for a successful migration, from initial planning all the way through application and database decomposition. You'll learn several tried and tested…


Book cover of The Pragmatic Programmer

Mariano Anaya Author Of Clean Code in Python

From my list on building high-quality enterprise software.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a software engineer because I’m a builder at heart. I have always had a profoundly curious mind, and always enjoyed tinkering. So at one point in my life, it became evident that I was going to be an engineer. I consider teaching the final step of learning, so whether this means writing an article or giving a talk, or simply sharing recommendations, I make a final effort to share with the community of like-minded people what I have learnt. For this reason, I hope you enjoy reading my book and the ones I recommended.

Mariano's book list on building high-quality enterprise software

Mariano Anaya Why Mariano loves this book

I've found this book to be instrumental in my career as a software engineer, especially because it's full of useful and practical advice on how to be effective and productive on a day-to-day basis, but it also includes actionable advice, and helped me a lot on thinking about my career long-term.

By David Thomas , Andrew Hunt ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Pragmatic Programmer as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Straight from the programming trenches, The Pragmatic Programmer cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process--taking a requirement and producing working, maintainable code that delights its users. It covers topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse. Read this book, and you'll learn how to



Fight software rot;
Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge;
Write flexible, dynamic, and adaptable code;
Avoid programming by coincidence;
Bullet-proof your code with contracts, assertions, and exceptions;
Capture real requirements;
Test ruthlessly and…


Book cover of Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

Jan Van Ryswyck Author Of Writing Maintainable Unit Tests: Mastering the Art of Loosely Coupled Unit Tests

From my list on starting your software developer journey.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a professional software developer for more than 22 years now. I’ve used many programming languages, platforms, frameworks, etc. throughout my career. However, the only constant for me personally was the practice of Test-Driven Development. I’ve never stopped learning about the principles and practices behind it, and it paid huge dividends throughout my career. I’m very humbled and grateful to be able to learn from all those amazing people over the years, that I decided to write a book on the topic. Giving back some of the knowledge that I gathered about TDD throughout 18+ years. 

Jan's book list on starting your software developer journey

Jan Van Ryswyck Why Jan loves this book

I must admit that the first time I read this book, it completely didn’t resonate with me. Sure, I picked up a couple of very important concepts here and there. One of those concepts is the “Test Data Builder”. However, some of the techniques I completely rejected. It took me a couple of years to start opening up to the practices described in this book. After a second read, I came to the conclusion that this excellent work deserved more credit. That’s why I added it to this list. This book shaped my entire thinking around Outside-In TDD, which is a very important approach to guiding well-designed software systems.     

By Steve Freeman , Nat Pryce ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Foreword by Kent Beck

"The authors of this book have led a revolution in the craft of programming by controlling the environment in which software grows." --Ward Cunningham

"At last, a book suffused with code that exposes the deep symbiosis between TDD and OOD. This one's a keeper." --Robert C. Martin

"If you want to be an expert in the state of the art in TDD, you need to understand the ideas in this book."--Michael Feathers

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is now an established technique for delivering better software faster. TDD is based on a simple idea: Write tests for your…


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Book cover of My Book Boyfriend

My Book Boyfriend by Kathy Strobos,

Lily loves her community garden. Rupert wants to bulldoze it. When feelings grow, will they blossom or turn to rubble?

"It literally had everything! - Bookworm Characters - Humor - Banter - Swoon-worthy lines."  - Book Reviewer.

Book cover of Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

Yevgeniy Brikman Author Of Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery: A Hands-On Guide to Deploying and Managing Software in Production

From my list on practical, hands-on books on DevOps and software delivery.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve spent more than a decade working on infrastructure, from my early days at LinkedIn, where we had to do a massive DevOps transformation to save the company, to co-founding Gruntwork, where I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of companies on their software delivery practices. From all of this, I can say the following with certainty: the DevOps best practices that a handful of the top tech companies have figured out are not filtering down to the rest of the industry. This is making the entire software industry slower, less effective, and less secure—and I see it as my mission to fix that.

Yevgeniy's book list on practical, hands-on books on DevOps and software delivery

Yevgeniy Brikman Why Yevgeniy loves this book

This is one of those books that changed how I thought about and approached software development. First, the book addressed the pain points that I had run into so often: the problems with infrequent, manual deployments, the outages caused by changing configuration rather than source code, the nightmare of merge conflicts that you get from long-lived feature branches, and so on.

Then, it showed how to flip the typical software development process on its head through CI / CD, changing the default from “our software is broken, and we need an integration and release process to get it working” to “our software is always working, and we can release it at any time.” Once I read it, I could never go back to the old way.

By Jez Humble , David Farley ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Continuous Delivery as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the 2011 Jolt Excellence Award!

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid,…


Book cover of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
Book cover of Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
Book cover of Kubernetes in Action

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