Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point

For me, especially the Lean practices are a very good fit for operations and sysadmin work.

* Getting Things Done, David Allen,
* Getting Real, Fried et al.
* Crucial Conversations, Patterson et al.
* Crucial Confrontations, Patterson et al.
* Getting to Yes, Fisher et al.

Good books. I’d add the following:

* High Performance MySQL (2nd edition), Zaitsev et al.
* Pro MySQL, Kruckenberg & Pipes

Both excellent, up-to-date, detailed books – on my desk at all times.

* Extreme Programming Explained (both editions – the first is more polemical), Kent Beck
* Agile Estimating and Planning, Mike Cohn
* Agile Software Development with Scrum, Schwaber & Beedle

This trio represents an excellent introduction to building software in an Agile manner.

* The Ruby Way (2nd edition), Hal Fulton
* The Ruby Programming Language, Flanagan & Matsumoto

The two best Ruby books – the Ruby Way is hands-on, cookbook style, the second is now my standard reference, although I do keep the Pickaxe book to hand too.

* Dive into Python, Mark Pilgrim

One of the best ever ‘learn to program’ books – assumes the reader knows how to program already.

* Classic Shell Scripting, Robbins & Beebe

The best shell scripting book I’ve come across. Use alongside the online Advanced Bash Scripting guide, and the O’Reilly Sed and Awk book.

* Mastering Regular Expressions (3rd Edition)

Both an excellent introduction and a useful reference work.

* The Little Schemer (4th edition)

Perfect introduction to thinking functionally

* DNS & Bind (5th edition), Liu & Albitz

Essential reading – DNS underpins pretty much everything we do.

* Sendmail (2nd & 3rd edition), Bryan Costales

The second edition has a comprehensive introduction to SMTP – worth having even if you don’t use sendmail. If you do use sendmail, the 3rd edition and also the cookbook are required reading. Otherwise I recommend;

* The Exim SMTP Mail Server, Philip Hazel

* Backup & Recovery, W.Curtis Preston

Super treatment of the hugely important task of backup and recovery – will aid understanding as well as provide technical guidance.

* Scalable Internet Architectures, Theo Schlossnagle

A must read for anyone involved it trying to scale any project.

* Optimizing Linux, Phillip Ezolt

Good overview of Linux performance tuning.

* RHEL 5 Unleased, Tammy Fox

The best one-volume RHEL/CentOS book on the market.

* ITSkeptic books – http://www.itskeptic.org/books
Tongue in cheek ITIL, love it.

* Head First Design Patterns – http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007126
Clear simple description on design patterns, something a lot of sysadmins don’t know from scripting only

* Kanban book coming up by David Anderson – http://www.agilemanagement.net/
Not yet published but read a preview. Great explanation why flow is important and how to work with specialists

* Ruby for System Administration – http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590598210
Somewhat dated, but has a nice chapter on creating DSL’s

* Practical TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers – http://www.manning.com/koskela/
While in Java, it’s a great resource on things you can do with TDD and how to tackle problems.

Aaaah, too many great books ;-)

Will take a look Lindsay – after reading Release It! I’m quite keen to get a few more of the PragProj process/story type books under my belt. Thanks for pointing it out.

Very good way of organizing your work day.

I’d considered putting Pulling Strings up on my list, but left it off as I didn’t want to get too tool-specific. It’s still one of the only books [I know of] that brings up the concept of configuration management in any significant detail though – albeit obviously focussing on the Puppet way of doing this – and based on that alone deserves a place on the list.

I haven’t come across the other two books you mention, but will be ordering Visible Ops asap – looks like a great (and more importantly practical) boiling down of ITIL into something more generally usable. Is this a fair statement?

I would also recommend the following books:
* Visible Ops: http://www.itpi.org/home/visibleops.php
* Art Capacity Planning and Scaling Resources – http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596518579
* Pulling Strings with Puppet – http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590599780

This process of triage of planned/unplanned work can be codified into software such as RT or other work/ticket tracking software, and doing so adds searching & reporting so you can do lots of analysis on the data you create.

-Adam

Good to see you’re trying some of the stuff from devopsdays’09 at home :)

I will be particularly interested to follow what comes out of this experiment, since I think it is quite similar to the situation I was in at my previous job.

I think the board description should read:
“The board is divided into three areas: Support Bucket (Blue); Emergency (Red); and normal workflow (Green).”

Best of luck!
Gildas