Best books for Support Engineers

Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems

by David J. Agans · 2002

~190 pages~5 hrs to read

Nine plain rules for finding faults: understand the system, make it fail, quit thinking and look, change one thing at a time. A good first-month read when every ticket is a bug you have to reproduce before you can explain it.

The Linux Command Line

by William E. Shotts · 2011

~500 pages~13 hrs to read

A tour of the shell, files, permissions, processes, text processing and basic scripting. Read it early so reading logs, grepping and running commands on a customer's box stops being slow.

Learning SQL

by Alan Beaulieu · 2005

~380 pages~10 hrs to read

Covers querying, filtering, joins, grouping and subqueries, with exercises. Useful when you start looking up a customer's records yourself instead of waiting on an engineer to run the query.

Docs for Developers: An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing

by Jared Bhatti, Heidi Waterhouse · 2021

Covers planning, writing and maintaining documentation for developer audiences, including tutorials, reference and troubleshooting pages. Helpful once you are writing replies, help-center articles and bug reports other engineers have to act on.

How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know

by Brian Ward · 2004

~390 pages~10 hrs to read

Explains how a Linux system boots, manages devices, runs services and handles networking and storage. Read it when tickets start to hinge on what the operating system is doing underneath the product.

High Performance Browser Networking

by Ilya Grigorik · 2013

~400 pages~10 hrs to read

Covers TCP, TLS, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, WebSockets and the behaviour of mobile and wireless networks. Helps you explain latency, timeouts and dropped connections when a customer's API calls fail only from some networks.

Observability Engineering

by Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, George Miranda · 2022

~400 pages~10 hrs to read

Describes structured events, tracing and how to ask new questions of production systems when something breaks. Worth reading once you work from your company's logs and traces and want to give engineering sharper escalations.

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DeLisi · 2013

~260 pages~7 hrs to read

Argues for lowering customer effort in service interactions and draws on a large service-contact study. A practical lens for deciding how to answer, when to hand off, and what to fix at the source.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan · 2001

~300 pages~8 hrs to read

Techniques for staying level and getting to the real issue when a conversation turns tense. Useful for angry customers, disputed root causes, and pushing back on engineering or product when an escalation is stalled.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff · 2016

~520 pages~13 hrs to read

Essays on monitoring, incident response, postmortems, on-call and service-level objectives. Read it when you help run incidents or shape how support and engineering share ownership of outages.

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

by Michael T. Nygard · 2007

~380 pages~10 hrs to read

Case studies of how production systems fail, with patterns such as timeouts, circuit breakers and bulkheads. Gives senior support engineers a vocabulary for recurring failure modes and for pressing engineers on fixes.

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier · 2017

~240 pages~6 hrs to read

Walks through each step from mentoring to tech lead to managing managers. Read it when you start mentoring newer engineers, leading a queue or team, or weighing a move into management.