Fans pick 39 books like Release It!

By Michael T. Nygard,

Here are 39 books that Release It! fans have personally recommended if you like Release It!. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

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 did Magnus love 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…


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 did Magnus love 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 did Magnus love 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…


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 did Magnus love 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 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 did Jan love 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…


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 did Yevgeniy love 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 Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set ...Test!

Cory Lebson Author Of The UX Careers Handbook

From my list on starting in user experience (UX) design and research.

Why am I passionate about this?

There is a scene in the 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Traveler by HG Wells where the protagonist goes rapidly into the future as he watches a whole city spin into existence around him. That’s how I feel about my career. I started in 1994 and have watched UX grow into an incredible field! I’ve run my own business since 2008 focused exclusively on qualitative research consulting while also doing all sorts of exciting thought leadership activities – from writing to speaking to creating a number of courses on LinkedIn Learning – and I love to build my UX network too! I live in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Cory's book list on starting in user experience (UX) design and research

Cory Lebson Why did Cory love this book?

As a UX researcher, although I offer a variety of qualitative research services, usability testing is definitely the top research approach that I’m hired for.

As such, this book is the best deep dive into usability testing methods out there. Pretty much every aspect of usability testing is covered – from planning, to conducting the research to reporting out on findings.

I appreciate how it also presents variations on usability testing and find that this book gives me good ideas when having to best explain some nuance of usability testing to my clients.

By Carol M. Barnum,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Usability Testing Essentials as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Usability Testing Essentials presents a practical, step-by-step approach to learning the entire process of planning and conducting a usability test. It explains how to analyze and apply the results and what to do when confronted with budgetary and time restrictions. This is the ideal book for anyone involved in usability or user-centered design-from students to seasoned professionals.

Filled with new examples and case studies, Usability Testing Essentials, Second Edition is completely updated to reflect the latest approaches, tools and techniques needed to begin usability testing or to advance in this area.


Book cover of Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns

Jesse Liberty Author Of Git for Programmers: Master Git for effective implementation of version control for your programming projects

From my list on for creating great software.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been coding for over 30 years. I’ve seen some miserable interfaces, and some large programs that collapse under their own weight. Software was, at one point, notorious for being late, over budget, and unreliable. These books have helped turn the corner on these failings, and I have found each of them very valuable in my day-to-day programming. While you can learn technique and even languages online, the kind of insight found in these books is rare and worth spending time and money on.

Jesse's book list on for creating great software

Jesse Liberty Why did Jesse love this book?

There are literally dozens of good books on unit testing, but I highly recommend reading at least one. Unit testing is one of the most important practices that a great many programmers do not do. It isn’t easy, once you get past tiny programs, but it is absolutely essential if you wish to create robust code. Without unit testing you fix one thing over here, and break it over there. With good unit testing you know that your program will be flexible and easily evolved.

By Vladimir Khorikov,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Unit Testing: Principles, Patterns and Practices shows you how to refine your existing unit tests by implementing modern best practices. You'll learn to spot which tests are performing, which need refactoring, and which need to be deleted entirely! Upgrade your testing suite with new testing styles, good patterns, and reliable automated testing.



Unit Testing: Principles, Practices and Patterns is a practical guide to modern unit testing best practices. Microsoft MVP Vladimir Khorikov takes you hands-on with examples of the ideal unit test and unit testing practices, building your skills step by step on a solid foundation.



Key Features

* A…


Book cover of xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code

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 did Jan love this book?

This is the most complete and exhaustive reference book when it comes to test automation. It’s a massive book that’s got pretty much all bases covered: test patterns, test strategies, test smells, test practices, etc. … It’s all there. If you want to get a feel about what’s covered, check out the xUnit Test Patterns website. This book provides all the information to become an expert at all kinds of automated tests. It requires a lot of effort to process the content, but it’s definitely all worth it!

By Gerard Meszaros,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked xUnit Test Patterns as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Software testing has received renewed attention with the widespread adoption of Extreme Programming and other agile methodologies. While testing does not directly improve the quality of software, the under-appreciated practice provides a timely and accurate measurement (a reality check) so that the reader knows whether any new action needs to be taken. Automated software testing is used to ensure that once the software works, it is not accidentally broken during subsequent software development or maintenance activities. This book describes patterns for writing automated tests using the XUnit family (e.g., JUnit and NUnit) of test automation frameworks. The author uses the…


Book cover of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Markus Gärtner Author Of ATDD by Example: A Practical Guide to Acceptance Test-Driven Development

From my list on surviving the Agile world as a software tester.

Why am I passionate about this?

Markus Gärtner works as Organizational Design Consultant, Certified Scrum Trainer, and Agile Coach for it-agile GmbH, Hamburg, Germany. Markus, author of ATDD by Example - A Practical Guide to Acceptance Test-Driven Development, a student of the work of Jerry Weinberg, received the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person Award in 2013 and contributes to the Softwerkskammer, the German Software Craft movement. Markus regularly presents at Agile and testing conferences all over the globe, as well as dedicating himself to writing about agile software development, software craft, and software testing, foremost in an Agile context.

Markus' book list on surviving the Agile world as a software tester

Markus Gärtner Why did Markus love this book?

While this book was still in the writing, Crispin and Gregory published draft chapters on the internet.

At the time, I read them, and managed to introduce many of the great insights into my own work. Even though I was working in a more traditional environment, the ideas from the two ladies inspired me on my journey to the agile methodologies.

I even managed to contribute some of my own real-world examples from my own experiences to their writings – and they decided to include some of them.

By Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Te>Two of the industry's most experienced agile testing practitioners and consultants, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, have teamed up to bring you the definitive answers to these questions and many others. In Agile Testing, Crispin and Gregory define agile testing and illustrate the tester's role with examples from real agile teams. They teach you how to use the agile testing quadrants to identify what testing is needed, who should do it, and what tools might help. The book chronicles an agile software development iteration from the viewpoint of a tester and explains the seven key success factors
of agile testing.…


Book cover of Kubernetes in Action
Book cover of Kafka in Action
Book cover of Learning OpenTelemetry: Setting Up and Operating a Modern Observability System

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