Understanding Distributed Systems, Second Edition: What every developer should know about large distributed applications Paperback – 1 January 2023

Book covers the breadth of distributed systems and is a really a good read, I would recommend to anyone who wants to know the world of distributed systems

This is my first book on distributed systems and I loved the content and The references ! Highly recommend for anyone starting up!

Covers good breadth of distributed systems but not in depth, but that’s usually mostly needed to know various technologies at play in large scale distributed system, interested people can read further for details on specific technology.

I reviewed some other book with torn cover. Don’t know hope to return or replace

This book has a comprehensive index on distributed systems but the content in those chapters is quite poor. Some chapters are just a page long. The content is very generic without any details from real world applications. Only good for skimming through.

This book covers the basics of distributed systems in a very simple and friendly manner. I 100% recommend it for beginners and experienced developers who wish to learn or refresh their knowledge of distributed systems.

Good for understanding theoretical concepts with practical examples. Recommend it!

Definitely one of the best introduction book for Distributed Systems out there. Recommended if you are new to the area or simply want to get broad knowledge on how things are connected and communicate with each other. Goes deep enough in most topics that you can search for more information on a certain topic if you're curious.

This is a solid book. If you are a software engineer at a reasonably big company, especially if you are working on server side, data intensive systems, this book will likely be very useful, even if you have experience.Roberto Vitillo discusses a wide range of topics, going for breadth over depth in most cases. There is a little theory, for example regarding coordination and leader election but the bulk of it is very practical. The main areas likely to be useful for practical work are about networks, security, APIs, databases (including replication, transactions and partitioning), caching, load balancing, messaging, monitoring, observability and testing.As the title suggests the focus is on the problems and challenges that occur when you are running software systems on more than one machine. The key point is that faults and failures are inevitable (largely because of not knowing what goes wrong across communication links), but that they can managed more effectively by making things as scalable, reliable and maintainable as possible. This entails certain architectures, best practices and the right tools.There are loads of useful references for deeper dives.If you have read the also excellent "Designing Data Intensive Applications" (Kleppmann) this is quite similar, though a bit lighter, a fair bit more practical, and a good complement. Because it is so practical it could be a very useful resource for a system design interview.

The book has a very good balance between detail and breadth coverage of the topic. It goes just into enough detail to grasp a good primary understanding of every subject. Before reading any book on distributed systems, I'd suggest reading this one as it ease reading more complex material. It even offers a lot of references (books, papers and videos) to go into more detail.The text is easy to read, not too mathy nor obscure, and goes straight to the point.