How do I get a list of popular posts by views?

I am using the Jetpack plugin to get ‘site stats’ which shows the number of views for blog posts/pages. So I’m no expert or anything but I’m guessing there is a table that stores these views. Is there a way to manipulate this data to create a simple list of the most popular posts by views in the sidebar?

Currently, I’m using a plugin for this but I’d prefer to hard code it straight into the theme.

Any guidance would be massively appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

Personaly i already used the wp-postviews plugin and it works fine. Comes with a widget to display the list in a sidebar.