Essential Literature
When time permits, I like to read books and papers on our industry and I think to understand most of the ideas that drive it forward are very well described within the books presented below.
The Practice of Cloud System Administration
Buy 'The Practice of Cloud System Administration' on Amazon.com
Most of the time, practices, procedures and general concepts are a lot more useful to learn off the job instead of ever-evolving technologies and tools especially when working "cloud". I personally take this book and it's predecessor (heavily recommended as well) off the shelf quite often, may it be to find a template for concept or documentation work or lookup basics of capacity management. This book won't teach you AWS, Azure or GCP, but universally applicable ways of doing your job.
The Phoenix Project
Buy 'The Phoenix Project' on Amazon.com
Should be a no-brainer and on everyone's reading list visiting this page. Basically a novel on how to "DevOps". This book made me quit a job and served as a hub for so many ideas I could barely articulate at that time.
Accelerate - The Science of DevOps
Buy 'Accelerate' on Amazon.com
Some people I've met in my professional life told me that they do not believe in DevOps and that it's only working at the so-called unicorns like Facebook and Google and that most principals are stricly not compatible with their industry, regulation requirements, tools and whatever serves as an alibi to start changing things for the better. Whenever this happens, I talk about this book as it takes a scientific approach into things. Using reliable statistic methodology, it underpins the value of good IT and software engineering practice both for organizations and the individual contributors within.
The DevOps Handbook
Buy 'The DevOps Handbook' on Amazon.com
Like in 'The Practice of Cloud System Administration' this book presents general principals that can be applied universally. In addition to that, most of them are illustrated using case studies across industries. In difference to the first book mentioned, The DevOps Handbook is using a higher abstraction layer making it more useful for management or executives, but it manages to bridge the gap between management and technology quite well. At the end of the day, creating a shared value stream across the whole organization is one of the main ideas behind DevOps, so just give it a try!