Read Time: 1 Minute
The Phoenix Project, written by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford, was for me infuriatingly hard to stop listening to. Reading the cover, you’d think it’d be a rather dry book about an IT department struggling to meet impossible targets and deadlines.
You’d be half right. It’s compellingly written, though, so I couldn’t help but get sucked into the drama, and the chaos, and it had me rooting for the IT guys and gals to get a win.
I picked this up because it is somewhat related to my day job. Many of the struggles in this book are ones I have put up with, and some I’m still trying to overcome. Filled with lots of great examples that not only explain how DevOps works and great practices to implement to make your department function, explained in a way that virtually anyone can understand.
Learning would be much more fun if more books existed like this to explain other concepts. I could easily listen to and learn any subject if it was written in this style.
The narration by Chris Ruen was fine. Not a whole lot of distinction between some voices, but enough not to get lost. Quality was excellent, with no flaws, double-takes, or background sounds to pull me out of the story.
TL;DR – This was surprisingly good for what is a rather mundane topic. I’ll be listening to it again to tweeze out pieces of wisdom.