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0 pointslibraryofbabel5y ago0 comments

Did you find it unremarkable because you already know the material, or because the material isn't relevant to what you do?

Anyway, some reasons:

* Draws together a wealth of material on databases and distributed systems that wasn't explained in a systematic, accessible way anywhere else. It provides a map to someone coming to this hard-to-navigate area for the first time.

* Great balance between being conversant with the academic research (without being too abstract) and being practically applicable (without being too tied to details of particular technologies)

* Shows underlying unity and concepts of very different data technologies, e.g. why classic relational database write-ahead logs and replication are very similar to streaming platforms like Kafka

* Subjective, but it is very clear, accessible, and well-written. This is very very hard to do and quite rare in technical books.

It's my favorite technical book of the decade and my first recommendation to anyone who asks me how to really "level up" as a senior engineer.

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sdevonoes5y ago

While I agree with all your points (I also think the book is a good one), I don't agree with the "level up" part. I don't see how, after reading carefully the book, any software engineer can "level up". If you don't have practical experience implementing (or dealing with, or maintaining) some of the scenarios the book talks about, then in no way one can "level up" just by reading the book.

libraryofbabelOP5y ago

Ah, yes, I should have said “first _reading_ recommendation” for how to level up! (And added: primarily for web backend or data engineers.)

Yes, of course you can’t level up just by reading a book; experience is the only way. The key thing - as you know, if you like the book - is that this book provides a coherent framework for thinking about data systems that engineers can fit their particular experience into. That “weird race condition” becomes less mysterious when it’s framed in terms of concepts like write skew or phantoms; joining two streams together becomes a problem about time and ordering. And so on. In fact the reason it’s such a great book is that you can read it with not much experience or background beyond basic database knowledge, absorb a lot of the ideas, and then keep coming back to it as your experience grows and you encounter new kinds of scenarios in your day to day work.

yodsanklai5y ago

The book provides tons of reference. I know that while reading the book, I experimented with many of the software described in the book. The author makes a good job at comparing various techs in putting them in context. This is very hard to do by just following a web of tutorials on the web.

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