For those who are interested, all of Boyd’s works are available at Defense and the National Interest.

Start with Patterns of Conflict. My advice is the same as someone gave me when I started reading Faulkner: Just pick up the book and read! It might be best, though, not to try to finish it in one sitting.

Particularly like:

“I suspect that to Boyd, writing a book was more a “being” than “doing”. Why? Surely writing a book, adding to the stock of ideas, setting those ideas out in the world in a coherent and permanent way is “doing”? But what Boyd actually did – read, think, argue, and make live, in-person briefings — was more consistent with his own theories and his own ethic of “doing”. This is true for several reasons.First, Boyd was theoretically committed to “living, open-ended” systems….By this analysis, once a book is written, it is dead. It is already superseded before the first copy is printed. Hence, Boyd kept his briefing process open. The Boyd briefing was a living and evolving thing in a way a putative “Boyd book” could never have been. Col. Osinga specifically notes Boyd’s “deliberate refusal to ‘finish’ a briefing.” The briefings were never set in stone, as a book would have to be. Again, this is not to say there is no value in writing and reading books. Boyd read lots of books. But he did not write one himself because he was doing something different from what book-writers do.”

You may have nailed it there.