Here we are, July 2022, in the middle of a scorching summer, so I’d guess it is a perfect moment to relax near the sea and read a book or two. I’ve compiled a list of favourite books that I can personally recommend. All the books are paperbacks that I own, and I’ve read back to back; also, I’ve gone through most of the examples myself, so no cheating here 😉
The order that I’m presenting the books doesn’t reflect the quality; in fact, all are great books;
Google Cloud for DevOps Engineers
Let me recommend you this book from Packt.
First, this is not a straightforward preparation guide to achieving the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer; it is much more than that: it’s almost a textbook on the subject matter that can be used as a guide for the certification. The edition of the book is one of the best I’ve seen from this publisher; As I mentioned before, this book feels like a college book but is written in a concise style.
But don’t get me wrong, the book goes intense on many topics, like, for instance, K8’s and GKE, hands down one of my favourite parts. An excellent introduction or refresher to the case helps to grasp many concepts in not many pages.
Another section that stands out is the book’s first part, which introduces the DevOps/SRE concepts in an informative way – and not tied up to GCP. The monitoring section is pretty informative, as well.
One of the best books I’ve read about #gcp – but not limited to – and #devops.
Learning Domain-Driven Design
I can’t believe that 13 years have passed since I read the blue book of DDD, Eric’s Evan seminal work, and 11 since I worked on the first project using it. We were breaking a monolith into what we now call microservices or an early incarnation.
I was looking for updated literature about the subject when I found this excellent from Vlad Khononov. It provides the correct theory and practical examples to understand the different concepts and patterns. The style is clear and concise but academic, which is not easy to do.
Some stuff you are going to find in the book:
– Architectural patterns and Heuristics
– Microservices & EDA
– Datamesh
To summarize, one of the best books on the subject matter that can be used as a primer. I was expecting more examples, but that helped keep it to the book at a reasonable size, around 300 pages.
Note: The code listings are in C#, but they are very generic and easy to follow.
Data Engineering with AWS
This book from Packt is an excellent book to introduce yourself to the beautiful world of #analytics on #AWS. The author has done a fantastic job cramming into 440 pages many topics you may find when working on this field in the #cloud.
You pay the price, though; some topics are covered at an introductory level. For instance, ingesting data with #kinesis is a topic that needs a whole book, not a few pages. But you get an intro. Other chapters like “Transforming Data to Optimize for Analytics” are more comprehensive.
The book covers many recent services like AppFlow, Glue Studio, DataWrangler, and other third-party services.
An excellent #book that I’d recommend to data engineers that want to introduce themselves to
MICROSERVICES WITH SPRING BOOT AND SPRING CLOUD
I was looking for a book to replace my old book about microservices: “Manning Spring Microservices, 2017″. Specifically, that covered new tools and deployment in the cloud – I wasn’t that interested in the Spring part.
Well, this book does its job very well. I was so hooked that I read the book several times and went through most examples.
If I have to pick a few highlights, it would be the Kubernetes deployment chapters, Service Mesh and the replacement of Netflix components.
A word of advice. This book is a Packt Publishing release, so it follows its editorial style: very hands-on and includes many code listings. It agrees with me a lot but make sure that’s what you want.
Cloud Native GO
A few months back, I spent a weekend in Barcelona, one of my favourite cities. It was great to see the city back to life, filled with people and tourists 🙂 We even went to the beach on the first day!
OK, back to the book!
I liked it, the author’s style is very engaging, and I enjoyed having a fresh look at the different Cloud-Native Patterns from the GO perspective.
The only concern is that the subject is too broad to be covered in just 400 pages, so you can use this book as a good introduction, but you’ll need to complement this with other literature.
Professional Cloud Architect Google Cloud Certification Guide
Funnily enough, I’m not using this guide from Konrad Cłapa, Google Cloud Certified Fellow, to achieve the Architect certification, as I recertified in the beta; 77 intense questions in three hours, including questions from the new scenarios.
However, I have a bunch of GCP recertifications coming my way very soon, so I’m using this book as one of the stepping stones to resync and refresh my whole GCP knowledge.
This guide is very comprehensive and to the point but still clocks at 600+ pages; don’t worry, it includes lots of pictures 🙂
Also, you can find four mocks test (20 questions each) and an analysis of each case study. I only miss some review questions in every chapter.
Remember that this is a study guide, so expand each section accordingly and get practical knowledge as required. In RL, you don’t have a list of questions to choose from, and not everything is on the web; that’s where a mix of knowledge, experience and intuition kicks in.
LEARN AMAZON SAGEMAKER
I’ve had this book by Julien SIMON on my reading list for a while – it’s a 2020 release – and when I finally made the time to read it, I couldn’t put it down. Like the previous book, it’s a Pack Publishing release packed with examples so that you can start prototyping immediately.
It’s a hands-on book focused on Sagemaker and AWS services, so it’s not a book to learn Machine Learning in-depth. The good news is that you can learn to train and deploy pre-built models using Sagemaker without that specific knowledge.
The book gives you an excellent overview of Sagemaker, but it was written before 2020, I’d guess, so it doesn’t cover many new features like Sagemaker Studio, Autopilot, etc…
But not to worry :), there is already a second edition that covers all that new shiny stuff.
Happy Summer!
