Person
Every book Sam Newman recommended on podcasts
Key facts
- Sam Newman has recommended or discussed 7 books on podcasts, as of October 7, 2026.
- Sam Newman has talked about books on 1 podcast, as of October 7, 2026.
- Those books came up in 1 episode, as of October 7, 2026.
- The 3 books Sam Newman has mentioned in the most episodes, not counting Sam Newman's own, as of October 7, 2026: Balancing Coupling in Software Design, Fundamentals of Software Architecture and Growing Object-Oriented Software: Guided by Tests.
- The latest episode with a book mention from Sam Newman aired on October 7, 2026.
Updated
Sam Newman’s most recommended books
- Balancing Coupling in Software Design by Vlad Khononov
- Fundamentals of Software Architecture by Neal Ford
- Growing Object-Oriented Software: Guided by Tests by Freeman Steve
- Learning Domain-Driven Design by Vlad Khononov
- Domain-driven Design by Eric Evans
- sed and awk Pocket Reference by Arnold Robbins
Sam Newman is a software professional who appeared on The Pragmatic Engineer to discuss resilient systems. During the episode, he recommended several software and design books. He pointed to Freeman Steve and Nat Pryce's Growing Object-Oriented Software: Guided by Tests as a resource for understanding the London flavor of XP and TDD, while joking about its title. He also recommended Neal Ford and Mark Richards's Fundamentals of Software Architecture to the host as a good read on architecture. For modularity, he recommended Vlad Khononov's Balancing Coupling in Software Design and Learning Domain-Driven Design, describing the former as fantastic. In addition to his recommendations, Newman discussed several books during the conversation. He recalled that his boss gave him the O'Reilly sed and awk Pocket Reference by Arnold Robbins to help solve a Fortran codebase problem, and he brought up Eric Evans's Domain-driven Design while explaining the history of software modeling and enterprise business processes. Finally, he referenced his own book, Building Resilient Distributed Systems, noting that it used a comparison of SLAs and SLOs to show that meeting contractual guarantees alone may not satisfy customers, and explaining that its final chapters focused on the people and social factors involved in resilience.
Books recommended by Sam Newman
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Building Resilient Distributed Systems
Discussed“It's why I make the point in the book when talking about like the difference between SLAs and SLOs. Like the SLA is what you're going to get sued for if you breach. If you only ever deliver to the SLA, your customers are rarely ever happy.”
Where to get it
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Balancing Coupling in Software Design
Balancing Coupling in Software Design by Vlad Khononov is a specialized software engineering book that explores how to manage system dependencies and modularity effectively.
Recommended“I would say around the modularity, Vlad Khononov's book on balanced coupling is fantastic. And I mean, his book on DDD is also very good. But that that balanced coupling book is really great.”
Where to get it
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Fundamentals of Software Architecture
Fundamentals of Software Architecture by Neal Ford and Mark Richards is a comprehensive reference book that outlines the foundational patterns, characteristics, and trade-offs inherent in software architecture.
Recommended“I I think there's a few books I can point people at. I think the um Software Architecture Fundamentals by Neil Ford and Mark Richards is a good read. Just to be clear, they're friends of mine, so I'm not unbiased in recommending it.”
Where to get it
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Growing Object-Oriented Software: Guided by Tests
Growing Object-Oriented Software: Guided by Tests by Freeman Steve is an influential software engineering text that details the principles and practices of test-driven development from a London school perspective.
Recommended“It's sort of like if you want to know, you pretty to read growing object-oriented software guided by tests. One of the worst titled books in existence written by a couple of friends of mine. Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce.”
Where to get it
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Learning Domain-Driven Design
Learning Domain-Driven Design by Vlad Khononov provides a thorough entry point into domain-driven architecture and software modeling.
Recommended“I would say around the modularity, Vlad Khononov's book on balanced coupling is fantastic. And I mean, his book on DDD is also very good. But that that balanced coupling book is really great.”
Where to get it
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Domain-driven Design
Domain-driven Design by Eric Evans is a core software engineering book that explores how to model complex business domains and establish a shared ubiquitous language among developers.
Discussed“I mean that's what the whole domain driven design book came out 2000 Eric it was domain driven design came out 2004, and it was a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of software development was the process of us trying to model existing non-digital processes, and how you do that.”
Where to get it
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sed and awk Pocket Reference
Discussed“And he said he gave me a copy of the O'Reilly sed and awk book. And so, I spent 2 days learning how to do regular expressions. And I wrote a refactoring using regular expressions accounting for line lengths and everything else.”
Where to get it
Books Sam Newman wrote
Appearances
| Episode | Podcast | Date | Books |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building resilient systems with Sam Newman | The Pragmatic Engineer | 2026-10-07 | 8 |
Other mentions (6: passing, ad reads, own books)
“I'd written the first book of about microservices a little bit in my spare time at ThoughtWorks and then that book came out and I'd been at ThoughtWorks a long time and I realized that there's always a danger of becoming institutionalized.”
“And I saw it and thought, "Hang on a minute. Like, stuff I was talking about over here seems These things seem quite sensible." And I'd always wanted to write a book. I mean, honestly, I wanted to write an animal book. I wanted to write an O'Reilly book because that Zed Shaw book I was given.”
“And then I kind of realized that despite my best efforts, lots of people seem to be building microservice architectures. Even though if you've read my books, most of my book is about telling you not to do it. But you have to read the book which which is called microservices.”
“And that's that's what I wanted to do. I mean, I enjoy the process of writing anyway, but this is a book I wanted to be able to give to people. That's always been why I write a book. Every now and then I've gone to sit down to read a book to write a book and I found someone”
“The resolution of that often ends up being a decision about are we trading off consistency versus availability in PAC Elk or Harvest and Yield if you're going into that version of Brewer's Conjecture, but don't worry about that. That's in the book. That's why it's a later chapter.”
“I think if you're looking at things architecture, you're thinking in terms of modules, for me, I like I don't agree with everything in Mark and Neil's book, there's lots of great stuff in there. But for me, actually what starts I sort of mentioned earlier that writing the second edition of Building Microservices”