Goal
The path to "Infrastructure as Code"
Here is the reading path leading up to this book, derived from its dependencies and ordered from the fundamentals.
The path so far (3 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: To run a continuous delivery pipeline reliably, not just the app but also the infrastructure must be reproducible. Kief Morris's 'Infrastructure as Code' systematizes the principles of defining servers and networks as code—version-controlled, tested, and applied automatically—securing the environmental consistency that CD presupposes.