Probably not the best but I liked the Phoenix Project. It’s novel because it’s literally a novel. The story makes a case for the practice of devops through the

Probably not the best but I liked the Phoenix Project. It’s novel because it’s literally a novel. The story makes a case for the practice of devops through the medium of long form fiction. I probably liked it because at the end the protagonist’s company starts making progress on clearing their ops backlog which was cathartic for me to fantasize about. As for actual best, Tenebaum’s Distributed Systems was a key read for me starting my career as a first year developer working on large backend systems. I’ve probably forgotten 95% of the content, but it helped me develop intuition for the reasons and tradeoffs of system decision decisions. It’s 96 pages over your limit, but a lot of the end chapters of the book’s parts can be skipped. Also Designing Data-Intensive applications covers some of the same content with slightly less rigor so that is a good substitute.