Thompson, B. (2002). Understanding reliability and coefficience alpha, really, In B. Thompson (Ed.), Score reliability: Contemporary thinking on reliability issues (pp. 3-23). Newbury park, CA: Sage.
The whole book is good. Part of the argument Bruce Thompson makes here (and elsewhere) is that alpha is often used because that is what everybody uses when they have a scale, but that it often is not reporting what they think it does. The linked paper discusses some questions that I received in relation to alpha and related measures for binary test questions.
Article A dialogue about MCQs, reliability, and item response modelling