Goal
The path to "GitOps and Kubernetes"
Here is the reading path leading up to this book, derived from its dependencies and ordered from the fundamentals.
The path so far (5 books)
Why read this first: 'The Phoenix Project' lets you experience the chaos of IT operations through a novel, internalizing why DevOps is needed. Once you feel the problem, the royal road is to learn the solutions as systematic practices in 'The DevOps Handbook' by the same author team (Gene Kim et al).
Why read this first: Where 'The DevOps Handbook' surveys broad DevOps practices, Humble & Farley's 'Continuous Delivery' digs into its core—building deployment pipelines—as the original source. Ideal for solidifying the theoretical backbone of CI/CD after grasping the overall picture of practice.
Why read this first: A key to achieving continuous delivery is producing an artifact that 'runs the same everywhere'. Poulton's 'Docker Deep Dive' explains container-based standardization and portability from the ground up, fixing the standard form of the artifact a CD pipeline ships as a container.
Why read this first: After understanding how to build and run a single container in Poulton's 'Docker Deep Dive', the challenge in production becomes orchestrating many containers together. Lukša's 'Kubernetes in Action' explains container orchestration from the ground up, scaling you from one container to distributed operation.
Why read this first: Once you move past operating Kubernetes imperatively with kubectl, advance to GitOps, where you declare the desired state in Git and let it converge automatically. Yuen et al.'s 'GitOps and Kubernetes' shows how to implement the GitOps principles defined by CNCF—declarative, versioned, pulled automatically, continuously reconciled—with tools like Argo CD.