Recommended Agile Readings 2021

This book list is perfect for those interested in Agile, Scrum, or Lean! This list was compiled by keeping track of which books were mentioned the most in online project management communities. To compile our ultimate list of Agile books, we combed through Amazon reviews and evaluated their star ratings. Many of the principles described in these books are used to teach Agile project management courses, which are becoming increasingly common.

（Note: The * symbols mark highly recommended readings.）

1. Life and Philosophy

• Tao Te Ching (by Lao Tzu)
• Live Act (by Kazuo Inamori)
• Steve Jobs (by Walter Isaacson)
• Designing Design (by Kenya Hara)
• *Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (by Shunryu Suzuki)
• Out of Control (by Kevin Kelly)
• *Complexity: A Guided Tour (by Melanie Mitchell)

2. Leadership and Coaching

• *Influence (by Robert B. Cialdini)
• Creativity, Inc. (by Ed Catmull)
• Drive (by Daniel Pink)
• Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work (by David Rock)
• The Wisdom of Teams (by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith)
• Coaching for Performance (by John Whitmore)
• Co-Active Coaching (by Henry Kimsey-House et al.)
• The Art of Focused Conversation: 100 Ways to Access Group Wisdom in the Workplace (edited by Brian Stanfield)
• The Inner Game of Tennis (by W. Timothy Gallwey)
• Fearless Change (by Mary Lynn Manns, Linda Rising)
• Zero to One (by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters)
• Start with Why (by Simon Sinek)
• *Switch (by Chip Heath, Dan Heath)
• Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (by Patrick Lencioni)
• Reinventing Organizations (by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber)

3. General Management

• *Antifragile (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (by Stephen Denning)
• The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation (by Jay Elliot and William L. Simon)
• Good to Great (by Jim Collins)
• The Fifth Discipline (by Peter Senge)
• Becoming a Technical Leader (by Gerald M. Weinberg)
• Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (by Chip Conley)
• Amoeba Management (by Kazuo Inamori)
• The Participatory Marketing of Xiaomi (by Li Wanqiang)
• The Toyota Way (by Jeffrey Liker)
• The Essential Drucker (by Peter F. Drucker)
• The Mythical Man-Month (by Frederick P. Brooks)
• *Hackers & Painters (by Paul Graham)
• Getting Real (by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Matthew Linderman)
• *Rework (by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson)

4. Agile Management

• Agile Project Management with Scrum (by Ken Schwaber)
• Clean Agile (by Robert C. Martin, Uncle Bob)
• *Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) (by Craig Larman, Bas Vodde)
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (By Jeff Sutherland)
• Essential Scrum (by Ken Rubin)
• *Management 3.0 (by Jurgen Appelo)
• The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation (by Donald G. Reinertsen)
• *User Stories Applied (by Mike Cohn)
• Succeeding with Agile (by Mike Cohn)
• Agile Retrospectives (by Esther Derby, Diana Larsen)
• *Coaching Agile Teams (by Lyssa Adkins)
• Agile Coaching (by Rachel Davies, Liz Sedley)
• *The Great ScrumMaster (by Zuzana Sochova)
• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck)
• *Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, 2nd Edition (by Marty Cagan)
• Scrum and XP from the Trenches (by Henrik Kniberg)
• Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban (by Henrik Kniberg)
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (by Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres)
• Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum (by Craig Larman, Bas Vodde)
• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business (by David J. Anderson)
• *The Lean Startup (by Eric Ries)
• *Impact Mapping (by Gojko Adzic)

5. Agile Technical

• *Test-Driven Development (by Kent Beck)
• *Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (by Martin Fowler)
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code (by Michael Feathers)
• Clean Code (by Robert C. Martin, Uncle Bob)
• Agile Software Development (by Robert C. Martin)
• *Self-Expressed Codes (by Stephen Wang)
• *Effective Unit Testing (by Lasse Koskela)
• SOA with REST (by Thomas Erl, Benjamin Carlyle, Cesare Pautasso, Raj Balasubramanian)
• Agile Testing (by Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory)
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas)
• The Clean Coder (by Robert C. Martin)
• Clean Architecture (by Robert C. Martin)
• Specification by Example (by Gojko Adzic)
• The Art of Agile Development (by James Shore, Shane Warden)