5 books every IT professional should read

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Looking for books to help elevate your information technology (IT) knowledge?

The IT field is continually adapting to new advancements. In addition to building your knowledge and skills with a degree, it’s important to stay up to date on the latest technologies and follow how they’re being applied across business, healthcare, government and a variety of other industries.

Whatever your level of experience with IT, these books can help show you the implications of new technologies, give you a sense of how IT leadership and ethics work, provide in-depth topical knowledge and fill you in on the latest insights from the IT world.

5 books for IT professionals

 

1. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business and The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

Overview: The Phoenix Project is a book that follows IT professional Bill’s efforts to revamp his struggling company’s processes before his department gets outsourced. He’s tasked with organizing workflows, streamlining communications and turning around a behind-schedule project that’s critical to the organization’s success. The sequel follows software development professional Maxine as she navigates bureaucracy to help the company thrive in a time of digital disruption.

The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project present fundamental principles of DevOps management and software development through stories of a fictional company facing the pressures of growth and the need for more efficient process automation.

Apply this knowledge: With the fifth anniversary edition of The Phoenix Project, author Gene Kim includes a deeper look into the Three Ways described in the DevOps Handbook (featured below), helping readers explore new ways to improve IT applications in their organizations.

 

2. The DevOps Handbook, Second Edition: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability & Security in Technology Organizations

Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis and Nicole Forsgren

Overview: This award-winning, bestselling business handbook takes the successes described in The Phoenix Project and lays out how to achieve digital transformation in other organizations. The updated edition includes real-world case studies from multiple companies to illustrate how DevOps principles can be applied across all verticals of an organization.

Apply this knowledge: This guide takes DevOps out of the IT department and looks at how to use theories and practices effectively throughout an entire organization. Readers can explore a practical roadmap for scaling up IT capabilities across multiple departments.  

Interested in DevOps? Explore how to develop your skills in programming, system administration, automation, configuration management, security and project management with IT programs from Capella University.

 

3. The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma

Mustafa Suleyman

Overview: The last several years have seen an incredible proliferation of new technologies that could offer both promise and upheaval. Written by one of the cofounders of DeepMind and the current CEO of Microsoft AI, this book explores the risks posed by a wave of fast-developing technologies and then tackles ways we can help maintain control as we harness their greatest potential.

Apply this knowledge: This book discusses the present and upcoming challenges associated with governance, regulation and ethical uses of AI, ultimately calling for responsible development of these technologies

 

4. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Kevin Kelly

Overview: New technologies are driving trends in how we buy, work, learn and communicate with each other. Founder and former executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly details the inevitable changes technology will introduce over the next 30 years, describing how these changes will affect daily life and work.

Apply this knowledge:While technological advances can sometimes seem intimidating, Kelly discusses the positive impacts changes can have and how to prepare for and implement them.

 

5. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Alec Ross

Overview: Leading innovation expert Alec Ross examines the fields that will shape the world economy over the next decade, including changes to work and society related to IT development. With research from more than 40 countries and insights from global leaders, Ross asks and answers some of the hardest questions about our future.

Apply this knowledge: By understanding global trends, the author provides insight into how workplaces will need to adapt as technology changes the way people work over the next decade. He also examines how other countries may develop their own Silicon Valleys and looks at how parents can prepare their children for the changes technology will inevitably bring.

 

Keeping up with trends in your industry could help you stay sharp and informed about the evolving field of IT. It can also give you interesting topics for conversation with your colleagues.

Explore IT degree programs from Capella University to help develop your technical skills and meet the needs of today’s IT environment.