Recommended reading

Recipe-driven walkthrough of the workflows you actually hit in production — IAM cross-account, VPC peering, S3 replication, the lot. Great as a working reference, not a sit-down read.

The book that made Lambda click for me. Walks through event-driven patterns end to end — API Gateway, DynamoDB streams, Step Functions — without the marketing fluff.

The single most important book on distributed systems for working engineers. Replication, partitioning, consistency, consensus — explained so the trade-offs stick. Re-read it every couple of years.

Honest, current take on when microservices are worth it and when they make everything worse. The deployment + observability chapters alone justify the cost.

Interview-focused but doubles as a fast on-ramp to the design vocabulary — rate limiters, consistent hashing, key-value stores. Skim it before any senior interview.

The closest thing the field has to a code of conduct. The revised edition trimmed the dated parts; what is left is durable advice on craft, design, and career discipline.

The closest you will get to a peek inside one engineering org without working there. Best chapters: code review, dependency management, large-scale changes.

The clearest map I have read of the staff+ engineering track — how to operate at scope, write the docs that move orgs, and stay technical past senior. Required reading once you stop wanting management.