Learning Continuous Integration with Jenkins: An End-to-End Guide to Creating Operational, Secure, Resilient, and Cost-Effective CI/CD Processes, Third Edition

Jenkins is more than a place to run builds: it can be the working center of a software delivery process. In this third edition, Nikhil Pathania takes readers from the principles of continuous integration to the practical decisions involved in building, securing, scaling, and extending a Jenkins CI/CD environment.

Start with the purpose of continuous integration

The opening chapters explain why teams integrate code frequently and how practices such as version control, build verification, unit testing, static analysis, and artifact management fit together. That foundation gives the later Jenkins material a useful context: the tools matter, but so does the process they support.

Build and care for the Jenkins ecosystem

Pathania covers planning and deploying Jenkins, configuration as code, backups and upgrades, authentication, permissions, CSRF protection, and credential handling. Readers then see how Jenkins can connect with GitHub, SonarQube, and Artifactory, and how distributed agents—including Kubernetes- and Azure-based options—can support build workloads.

Move from configuration to pipelines

The book progresses into declarative pipeline concepts and code, then develops CI and continuous-deployment workflows. Its later material includes GitOps and Argo CD, shared libraries, security checks, and the use of AI coding assistants such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot when working on pipeline code.

For hands-on CI/CD work

With practical setup guidance, worked examples, and chapter questions and answers, this guide serves readers getting started with Jenkins as well as practitioners looking to broaden an existing CI setup toward continuous delivery. Developers, testers, release engineers, and DevOps teams can use it to explore both the pipeline itself and the infrastructure that keeps it dependable.

For anyone responsible for turning code changes into repeatable builds and deployments, this edition offers a structured route through the Jenkins tools and decisions involved.