100 Books Like The Phoenix Project

The first person to ever catch a hacker wasn’t an FBI or CIA agent. It was an astronomer, and his name was Clifford Stoll. This book is a biographical account of how he took on a German hacker who was selling secrets to the KGB in the 1980s. I love this book because it shows how anyone can play a role in cybersecurity.

As a kid, I watched the TV adaptation of the book for PBS’s NOVA program and went into cybersecurity in large part because of Stoll. Because cybersecurity wasn’t a profession at the time, Stoll created his own innovative techniques, like building the first computer honeypot to help catch the hacker in action. When his book was made into a PBS documentary, as a thank you for putting up with him and all the crazy things he had to do to track the hacker, he had all of… show more.

Accelerate is a book about data. The authors used data collected during their PhD projects in order to prove The DevOps is effective.

They have all sorts of different ways to measure DevOps, it sufficiency, and the fact that way more projects succeed when you do DevOps, rather than waterfall methodology.

The book essentially show can be used as evidence of return on investment when modernizing your IT department. I am a person who loves data, and thus I absolutely love this book. Also, if you listen to the audiobook version, one of the authors reads it to you and her personality really shines through in a fun way.

I really enjoyed listening to Nicole read a book about to me about data!

The DevOps Handbook is literally an instructional guide on how to do DevOps, properly.

It includes security, it includes how to run operations in a smooth and reliable manner, and of course, how to develop amazing software. It gets into all the nitty gritty, with every detail you would need in order to create a good DevOps system development lifecycle within your organization.

This is a technical book with technical examples.

The Unicorn Project book picks up where The Phoenix Project book ended.

There is a new character introduced named Maxine, and I want to be Maxine when I grow up! Her character is brave, fun, and endlessly patient as she transforms the way they build software to more effective and productive methods.

She has a family, and life outside her org, which is something I feel all of us can relate to, balancing life and work. She really saves the day, over and over again, as the book proceeds to change, update, and improve every single thing they do within parts unlimited, the fictitious company in this story.

It was a very fun sequel to The Phoenix Project.

This book is set in the same universe as The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, but it's at a new company named investments unlimited.

It's also a fictitious story, but with all brand new characters, and brand new problems! In this book they cover security much more deeply than any of the other previous books, talking about how compliance and audit can work together with the information security and DevOps teams.

They talk about common problems that I have faced in many organizations, and a lot of the stories feel so familiar I wonder if the authors have followed me around throughout my career.

Although of course they save the day in the end, there are many parts of the book where we're not quite sure if they're going to make it or not with various characters learning to see things in new ways, so that they can make… show more.

This isn’t just the story of the first cyberweapon ever launched by one country against another; it’s actually two detective stories woven together.

I loved how Zetter blends the stories of the cybersecurity companies trying to figure out how it was discovered and what the cyberweapon did, together with the efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency to track down the weird anomalies popping up in Iran’s nuclear program.

This book is a lot like The Godfather in terms of storytelling. You don’t need to know what a “Zero Day” is to get something out of it.

I found myself catching my breath as I read this riveting nonfiction tale chronicling "perhaps the first true, wide-scale cyberwar in history,” launched by the hacker group now known as Sandworm.

I was thrilled to be swept along on the high-stakes hunt for an “invisible force….striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage, on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization,” and I was gratified by the meticulous tracing, tracking, and revelation of the Russian villains of Sandworm.

I loved this one because there are so many really influential people in the world today who started out as hackers. Former Texas Legislator and presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke was a member of one of the first hacker groups, The Cult of the Dead Cow.

What really makes this one stand out for me was how Menn was able to illustrate how our culture of cybersecurity today, things like responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities, was shaped by the hacker ethos as a response to mega corporations actively trying to ignore the problem or even suing researchers to prevent them from talking rather than to fix the issues.

A Seat at the Table is a wonderful book about how the role of tech leaders in general and CIO specifically have changed dramatically over the last decades.

From a cost center where spending should be kept to an absolute minimum, with a strong focus on hardware to an enabling role that drives and innovate business. Mark Schwartz guides us through these changes in his normal entertaining way.

I've rarely (never) laughed out loud from a business book but this one did that for me.

Deming showed me how to think about organizational performance improvement. I was moving from a clinical psychologist in private practice to an organizational psychologist helping companies develop change strategies. I had studied and loved statistical variation in the context of scientific research, but not in the context of addressing real-world challenges. 

But Deming does something very surprising. He starts by understanding variation and then moves on to understanding organizational culture. Not the theoretical frameworks we all know, but the work world from the view of the front-line employee. Deming’s insight is that the central challenge of culture change is understanding the view of people closest to the work, the ones who perform operations.

They are not motivated by slogans and lofty ideas but by producing great products and services. Taking pride in the work they are doing is central to performance; lost by management fads and enhanced by doing it… show more.