Ask HN: What is the best book a company has ever produced about itself?

I would put a vote for Google's SRE book [0]. While it was originally published by O'Reilly[1], to the best of my knowledge, the authors were all SRE Googlers who were paid for their time working on it. Some very good war stories and advice there.

[0] https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/ [1] https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/site-reliability-e...

Moore Tool Company -- manufacturer of some of the machines that NIST uses to measure stuff[1] -- published a book called Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy that's pretty good: https://archive.org/details/FoundationsOfMechanicalAccuracy/...

[1]: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/09/meet-bob-pmls-...

Resend's recently published handbook: https://resend.com/handbook

For the home cycle mechanic Park Tools make a good guide book which utilises their products.

https://www.parktool.com/en-int/product/big-blue-book-of-bic...

I don't know if this answers matches the question but, could be interesting anyway: My take would be the book that Jobs received on NeXT and it's logo. Granted, it was not "by a company about itself", but, rather, "about a company by an agency". Still ...

"Creativity Inc" about Pixar should be a candidate.

The books by 37 signals (Rework) come to mind: https://37signals.com/books/

Especially "It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work" - directions towards greater productivity through greater QoL and not in the Silicon Valley Nursery Color Complex way.

Let my people go surfing - Patagonia

I'll go off topic to documentaries where the hustlers did themselves -

"Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened" was made by the Fyre Fest people.

Similarly the hilarious tech failure "Riot On!" was made by themselves. The director was a pseudonym.

A bit more on topic but meta it's interesting the US military has sent historians to current engagements since WW2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_detachment