Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In Silicon Valley, "ability to code" is now the uber-metric to track. Starting from how engineers are interviewed, actual hands-on work (due to processes that overemphasizes "do" over "think, e.g., daily stand-ups require you to say what concrete thing you did yesterday), evaluation of work ("move fast and break things") to over-emphasizing on downstream "fixes" (prod-ops culture, 24*7 firefighting heroism) - the top echelon of technology gravitated towards things that it can see, feel, measure. What often gets neglected in this "code be all" culture is deep understanding of fundamental concepts, and how most newer "innovations" are indeed built on a handful time-honored principles. Nowhere else perhaps is this more prominent than in data space that up-levels libraries and frameworks as the conversation starter. That gets in the way of success. It is indeed impossible to model Cassandra "tables" without understanding - at least - quorum, compaction, log-merge data structure. Due to the way the present day solutions are built ("fits one use case perfectly well"), if these solutions are not implemented well to the particular domain, failure is just a release away. Mr Kleppmann does a great job of articulating the "systems" aspects of data engineering. He starts from a functional 4 lines code to build a database to the way how one can interpret and implement concurrency, serializability, isolation and linearizability (the latter for distributed systems). His book also has over 800 pointers to state of the art research as well as some of the computer science's classic papers. The book slows down its pace on the chapter on Distributed System and on the final one. A good editor could have trimmed about 120 pages and still retain most value one could get from the book. That said, if you ever worked on data systems, especially across paradigms (IMS -> RDBMS -> NoSQL -> Map-Reduce -> Spark -> Streaming -> Polyglot), this book is pretty much only resource out there to tie the "loose ends" and paint a coherent narrative. Highly recommended!