Top Books on CI/CD Every Software Developer Should Read in 2024

What is CICD?

CICD and how it works

CICD and how it works

CI helps a CI/CD software developer make incremental changes to a software code base without affecting its quality.

Typically, an automated build-and-test process enables a software developer to ensure that the changes made to a code base are reliable. The code is then delivered as part of the CD process, making it easier for developers to change their code base. In the software world, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines are used to automate the process of making incremental changes to a code base.

Why is CICD important?

With the continuous integration process, organizations can quickly ship new software and improve the quality of their products by using a comprehensive package design process. This method ensures that new features and fixes are delivered to the production environment in a timely manner.

Best CI/CD books you should read this year:

Every software developer who wants to learn more about CI/CD should read more books about CI/CD frequently to remain updated. However, choosing the best book to read, and learning more about CI/CD can be challenging. TSince there are so many books available, the more the options, the more complex it becomes to choose which ones are the best; especially for new software developers.

Therefore, we will take a thorough look at the best CI/CD books for new and experienced software developers and what they offer.

Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment (2017)

This book is for software developers interested in learning more about the various aspects of the continuous integration process and how to deliver high-quality software using the tools available today.

The book introduces the concepts of continuous integration and how to set up a thriving CI environment and CI pipeline with the help of various tools such as Jasmine, Selenium, and Jenkins.

Book takeaways:

• In-depth and practical knowledge about Unit Testing
• Extensive content on Source Control
• Practice on integration tests
• Practice on big bang and incremental testing
• Building of a successful CI environment and pipeline

DevOps: Continuous Delivery, Integration, and Deployment with DevOps (2018)

This is one of the best CI/CD books in DevOps that focuses on DevOps as it relates to CI/CD. It is pertinent to understand that continuous integration is a core component of DevOps, as it enables the continuous updating of software code.

Thus, this book aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the core principles of DevOps, including continuous integration, deployment, and delivery. It also gives insight into various tools such as Jenkins, Chef, and Ansible.

The book introduces readers to the various life-cycle models of DevOps, and provides a comprehensive overview of the best practices of the DevOps framework. It covers the various tools that are used to automate the infrastructure. It also provides an overview of the continuous monitoring process with Nagios and Splunk.

Book takeaways:

• DevOps applications: Business scenarios
• Core principles of DevOps and how they relate to CI/CD
• Business drivers for DevOps adoption to big data
• Cloud computing
• In-memory computing

A practical guide to Continuous Delivery (2017).

The book introduces readers to continuous delivery and its various benefits. It then explores the structure of a generic pipeline for continuous delivery.

The author also talks about the common deployment strategies in continuous delivery, such as Blue/Green, Continuous Deployment, and Releasing. The book ends with discussing the optimization of software architecture for CD.

Book takeaways:

• Thorough description of the challenges in continuous delivery and how to solve them
• Management of continuous delivery introduction in an enterprise
• Software that facilitates continuous delivery of new capabilities
• Establishing an infrastructure for maximum software automation
• Ensuring appropriate performance via capacity testing

Continuous Software: Improving software quality and reducing risks (2007)

This is an exciting read about software development practices in CI/CD. It was first published in 2007 and is still relevant today because it contains useful modern information. It covers a wide range of topics and provides an overview of the various practices involved in software development.

Book takeaways:

• Learn how to make integration a “non-event” on software development projects
• Learn how to reduce the amount of repetitive processes in software development
• Teamwork practices and techniques for effective usage of CI
• Learn how to mitigate late defect discovery, low-quality software, lack of visibility, and lack of deployable software risks.
• Assessments of various CI servers and related tools on the industry

Hands-on Continuous Integration and Delivery (2018)

Here, you’d get an in-depth explanation of the various practices and techniques involved in continuous integration and continuous delivery. It goes through the multiple types of servers used in this process, such as CircleCI, Jenkins, and Travis. It also covers debugging and logging.

Book takeaways:

• CI/CD with automated testing
• Business scenarios

Conclusion

Are you a software developer or aspiring to be one shortly? Then, these books are a must-read for you. What CICD is to software development, so are CICD books to software developers.

They help expand developers’ perspectives on various aspects of CI/CD and how they relate to other facets of software development and programming.