2024-06-02
I really loved this book. It goes a lot into the internals of systems software such as databases, which programmers usually tend to think of as a black box.
One thing that really struck me is when it talks about isolation levels and about how the defaults in all major RDBMS's make transactions nearly useless. This is something I believe 99% of developers are completely unaware of and they would go insane trying to make sense of a bug caused by a lax isolation level.
I also throughly enjoyed the chapter about encodings, which is also something developers don't really usually have an understanding of, causing them to have only a partial understanding of the systems they develop. For example, if you dont understand how Protobuf works, it won't make a lot of sense to you why fields in a class need to be enumerated to use GRPC.
Overall, I would say this book is one of a kind and an essential read for anyone in the industry. You will come out of it as a better programmer than you were.