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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Recommended by the CTO of Azure, creator of Kafka, and many HN users on other threads including me :)

So many recommendations for this book but I really didn't like it, very theoretical. It lists a lot of the main data related software systems and how they work, but that seemed about it. I really expected comparisons and tradeoffs, eg when should you switch from using a database to a message queue to Kafka? No real world examples or design experience.

Groupthink. Just like that book about sleep and whatever other pop pseudo intellectual books are repeated on here.

Everything is so case specific. And at the same time most of the tools work pretty well for the scale of most companies to the point they it doesn’t matter when you chose what...

Because of those two I don’t know exactly what people expect apart from either specific use cases ( conferences , blogs , etc.) or generic fundamentals (the book).

Sounds like you didn't read the book. There's actually a section with the title "Message brokers compared to databases" with a detailed comparison.

I can't see in the ToC https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...

I would second the book and also suggest having a read through https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/?cards-body.sort-by=....

There are some interesting problems and concepts at scale explained really well.

The book is fantastic! If you want to get a feel for the book before diving in (it's quite long), I've written a summary/review:

https://henrikwarne.com/2019/07/27/book-review-designing-dat...

Seconded. Also each chapter has a comprehensive reference providing pointers to various technical topics mentioned in the chapter. The provided references serve a good starting if one wants to explore further any the area interests him/her. These references are also maintained at: https://github.com/ept/ddia-references

This book is a gem, concepts are greatly explained and is full of references to papers and other articles. I've heard people clearing systems design interviews just by using this book as reference. I'm not sure if it's an exaggeration but from what I can see it does a great job convering the fundamentals of scalable systems.

> CTO of Azure

Not by CTO of Azure but by CTO of Microsoft - Kevin Scott

Agreed. Captures a lot of the issues you get at scale.

Very solid book. Wish it had been out when I was still working on systems at cloud scale.

For me this book is a little dry and don't let me pass more than the first initial chapters.

I wish there were video versions of this.

I just bought this book. Thanks

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