A part of my daily job can be described as release-engineering stuff and I'd like to keep on improving my knowledge+skill even on that specific field.
Please, no generic/all-inclusive/2k-pages-long software engineering books: if possible, I prefer books focused on release-engineering, especially on the "build and release cycle".
Thanks.
Hard to beat these short but focused books:
Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
both in the pragmatic programmer series.
Beyond the good practical advice in the Pragmatic Programmer books Mitch recommends, for a good short treatise I'd recommend Bays' "Software Release Methodology", see http://books.google.com/books?id=WpcNAAAACAAJ&dq=isbn:0136365647&ei=R_zzSZuNOZTSkATxoNRw -- dated, but sure it's stuff I wish (in retrospect) I'd known about back in the '90s when I was supposedly the manager in charge of release processes and decisions for some software products!-)
Also add Visible Ops: it's a good overview of the downstream release management and change management (esp) processes, based on the ITIL framework.
This talk given by Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD maintainer) is an excellent introduction to release engineering. It's only 30 minutes long, but contains lots of golden nuggets of wisdom extracted over the last 10+ years of doing 6 month releases in a fairly big Open Source project.
Although SCM (Software Configuration Management) is not the same as release engineering, you can't have good release engineering practices without first adopting sound configuration management processes.
I recommend Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration as a good overview of SCM principles, although it was written before DVCS systems like git became widely used.
(The book has more to do with version control than the broader topic of "software configuration management")