In the name of transparency, or maybe stating the bleeding obvious, I confess I am that guy who can happily read an IT reference book or something like docs.microsoft.com or Practical 365 in the way someone else would read a popular fiction book. It’s partly an inability to turn off from the job, and partly just because I like learning how everything works. I’ve digested a ton of them over the last decade, so this blog is kind of my ‘acknowledgements’, where I’m recognising and conveying my gratitude to the ones most influential in the formation of my learning, writing style, and career.
10. Mastering IBM i, by Jim Buck and Jerry Fottral
My first company’s ERP system was hosted on an IBM i5/OS server – a descendent of the famous AS400 family. Fresh out of university – where I studied Computer Networking… nothing to do with ERP or AS400s! – it was an intimidating beast. Sitting in the corner of the server room (or, more accurately, coatroom), the iSeries churned away with enviable reliability and robustness. It partly achieved this stability by minimising its UI, almost entirely being managed over telnet console emulation sessions. Basic tasks were nerve-wracking for a newbie such as myself, but Mastering IBM by Jim Buck and Jerry Fottral served me well, explaining concepts such as the file system, virtualisation, and (most fun) Query for i5/OS.
9. The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition, by Thomas Limoncelli et al.
This (and others to come in the list) are books I devoured during my first job as a sysadmin, generally responsible for the uptime, stability, and management of my company’s IT infrastructure. “Practice'” offers best-practice, practical advice for anyone involved in IT infrastructure management on long-term planning, managing helpdesks, monitoring, backups and resiliency, and personal skills. This second edition was perfect for me in around 2012 when I started it, but in $currentYear is potentially a little outdated unless you are primarily on-prem. A new edition focuses on cloud environments so I’d recommend going for that if this sounds like something you’d benefit from.
8. Time Management for System Administrators, by Thomas Limoncelli
Limoncelli makes the list again for this excellent book on making the most of your time. It’s a quick read at about 200 pages but packed with practical advice and recommendations. How to manage your day, how to deal with interruptions (and minimise them), how to introduce habits into your week, etc. Worthwhile reading for anyone who struggles with time or wants a few good lifehacks (yes, I used that word).
7. Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition, by Evi Nemeth et al.
As a Microsoft 365 guy, my day-to-day work in production work environments doesn’t touch much on *nix. However, in my earlier days, I managed Ubuntu servers and studied Unix System Administration at university. In fact, it was the course I got my best grades in, primarily down to this amazing book. I wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to be slightly intimidated by Linux when starting off, coming from a Windows background. The terminal, the weird command names to remember, and being largely text-based as opposed to object-based. But Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook took complicated themes and made them easy to understand through simplification (just enough) and humour.
Evi Nemeth, the lead author, tragically has been missing for seven years, after sailing near the Tasman Sea. My thoughts are with her and her family; she is a true legend in mathematics and system administration.
6. Computer Networks, by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall
Another icon in computing, Andrew Tanenbaum is perhaps best known for his work on operating systems, particularly his Unix clone MINIX. In Computer Networks, he and David Wetherall deliver technical deep dives on protocols and technologies, catalogued by their place in the OSI model. My current role doesn’t require a tremendous level of knowledge about networking, but this still makes an excellent reference piece if anything comes up, particularly chapter eight on network security. This makes my influences list, like most others, because it gets into such deep levels of analysis and explanation without being overwhelming. You can pick this up, spend 10-30 minutes reading, it comes away really feeling you learned something that should have taken a lot longer.
5. Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition, by Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks
It’s 2013, and I’m leading a project on migrating my company from Lotus Domino and Notes to Office 365. In the early stages, I’m feeling good. The board are buying into it. Users love the idea of getting Outlook and the latest version of the Office apps. We’ve got good migration software that’s testing fine, and although I’m stressed about what could go wrong, I’m feeling pretty good.
Then I’m asked by a manager in our pilot group: “Can you give me permission to this mailbox, but not map it my Outlook?”. “Sure”, I reply, assuming it’ll just find a tick box somewhere in Exchange Online (and of course getting them to raise a ticket, as Thomas Limoncelli taught me in Time Management).
Some frantic Googling researching, and it transpires I need to use this thing called PowerShell to do it. “What?!” was my first thought. How could I be dragging us from the last century using Lotus only to need to back to a command line for basic stuff like this?
So, I fire up PowerShell ISE. “This is pretty cool – it basically holds my hand through the commands.” I log in to Exchange Online. “Hm, I can easily get lists of everything here, or apply settings to them all; not bad”. I run my command (or as I’d soon learn, cmdlet), and voila, it’s done. It becomes apparent to me very early on, if I want to have any kind of skill with our new Office 365 environment, and to scale administration, I need to get better at this…
I devoured “Lunches'” in no time at all, in fact going into my evenings and early mornings too. I used it in conjunction with Don Jones’s online materials, and before long I was taking my need to assign mailbox permissions into scripts, pulling things such as Active Directory attributes (manager) and applying automatically for new users. Since then, I’ve never been comfortable enough to call myself anything other than “experienced” in PowerShell (definitely not an expert), but “Lunches” by Don and Jeffery provides such a strong foundational level of knowledge that anyone in IT can pick it up, follow it through, then feel comfortable enough with any PowerShell problem that “hey, I can probably figure this out.”
4. The Art of Deception, by Kevin Mitnick
Another one from my early days in IT, at university, “Deception” got me interested in the basic rules of IT security as they pertain to people. It’s not my favourite book of his (keep reading), but I read this page to page in a couple of days. It’s mostly fictional stories inspired by his real-life experience as a prolific and controversial hacker, but also includes practical advice on corporate policy for information security. This maybe isn’t one for someone with a lot of infosec experience, but reading it at such an early stage in my IT life, it opened my eyes into what is possible beyond merely the tech.
3. Microsoft 365 Security Administration: MS-500 Exam Guide, by Peter Rising
OK, I know what you’re thinking. I mentioned I was a geek who’d read the documentation for fun, but an exam guide – really? Hear me out.
I’ve passed a bunch of Microsoft exams over the years and have had mixed experiences with the official exam reference books – some great, some not so great. This is in large part due to Microsoft changing exam objectives and also authors having to be careful around NDAs. It’s also caused by authors who don’t really translate super-technical topics very well to normal language that’s easily digested by newbies. This exam guide by Peter does it well – taking some rather advanced security concepts and distilling them into easy-to-understand concepts. I work with Microsoft 365 security daily (as you can tell if you read this blog) and that experience, coupled with this guide to formalise my understanding of things, helped me pass the exam first time.
That’s not the whole story of it making this list. Peter is a colleague and friend of mine; a fellow Microsoft 365 consultant who has helped and supported me constantly since I moved from internal IT to consultancy. This is his first book and part of a tremendous output of work and contributions of his to the Microsoft community that recently culminated in the much-deserved MVP award. Seeing his journey, in large part instigated by this book, has been very inspirational. And it’s just cool to be friends with an MVP! Thank you, Peter, for all your support and inspiration.
2. CCNA Study Guide, Fifth Edition, by Todd Lammle
It’s my second year of college, and we’ve finally progressed from learning about computer parts to networking. I’m sitting in a lecture about subnetting. My eyes are glazed over as my lecturer speaks, what I presume to be, an alien language; taking numbers, inverting them, converting them to binary, and somehow this means computer A knows computer B isn’t on the same network. Huh?
I’m left feeling completely out of my depth. Maybe this computing stuff isn’t for me. This is… maths? Or something weird, anyway. But, the lecturer recommended getting a CCNA study guide, so onto Amazon that night, buying Todd’s book.
The night the book arrives, I sit at my desk – distraction-free. I didn’t have a smartphone at the time, which, looking back, made studying so much easier. I remember planting the study guide flat on my desk on Chapter 3 and holding down either side of the book with other books; it was that massive, it just wanted to fold in on itself. Then, I crack on, notepad in front, and start doing subnet masks like my gran did crosswords, using Todd’s book as my reference guide.
The reason this particular book is so influential to me is it taught me you can learn what is, on first glance, beyond you. In fact, there really isn’t much beyond you. Put in the work – with the help good reference material – and you will learn it.
1. Mastering Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, by Mark Minasi et al.
By far the most influential technology book of my career, “Mastering” by Mark Minasi is what turned me into a Microsoft IT guy.
Until I read this, my grades in college and university were always worst in Microsoft subjects and highest in things such as networking or Linux. I was, frankly, perplexed by subjects such as Active Directory. Too complicated, too many gotchas, and difficult to get a bird’s eye view of. Additionally, I felt I was only ever told what to do and now how things actually worked. When I finally read Mastering, it was like sitting down with someone in normal conversation, explaining, after years of experiences, ‘here’s what you really need to know’.
Mastering matches my learning style as it explains thing from a high level, piecing together all the little bits you’ve heard of to reveal the bigger picture and where they all meet in the chain. Then, when you know that, it gets more technical – the AD database, etc. Reading it, I thought this is what I want to learn and this is how I want to teach. It was eye-opening how I could go from being so bamboozled, to just getting it.
Ultimately, learning comes down to putting in the time, but when the teaching material is written in an approachable way such as it is in this, that time both flies by and is reduced. If my blog and writing is even a patch on this, I’ll be glad.
Bonus: Ghost in the Wires, by Kevin Mitnick
Not really influential, but a thrilling read that is more like a novel than real life. One of the few books I can easily re-read, Ghost in the Wires is Kevin’s retelling of his prolific and controversial past as one of the FBI’s most wanted hackers. Starting with his time as a phreaker, things escalate as technology advances, and Kevin breaks into serious government agencies, ultimately serving prison time after being found guilty of numerous federal charges such as wire fraud.
