Understanding Distributed Systems – Book Review

Understanding Distributed Systems (cover)

I recently finished reading Understanding Distributed Systems by Roberto Vitillo. I was quite impressed by the quality of the book. It is one of the best computer science books I've read so far. A handful of others classify as such in my eyes.

But what makes this book so good, especially compared to other books in this genre - System Design?

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My thoughts on Java Concurrency in Practice

My thoughts on JCIP

One of my key goals this year was to gain a good understanding of concurrency and multithreading. I've always had a tangent understanding of it at best. The book Java Concurrency in Practice was one of my first picks.

Sure, I've used multithreading concepts like promises & ajax in JavaScript before. I've also spawned go routines & used mutexes in Go. But I've never felt I'm proficient enough to state that I have a good understanding of this subject.

Hence, to bridge this gap in knowledge & skills, I decided to invest in several concurrency related books & courses. My intention was to start from JCIP and then move on to some additional courses. Initially, I felt that just reading this book won't be sufficient to understand the subject thoroughly.

However, after going through this book I didn't bother looking into any other concurrency course at all. It is one of the most succinct and yet thorough books on a given topic that I've ever read.

Additionally, I would recommend you to go through this book even if you're not using Java at all. It will give you a very profound understanding of whatever framework/mechanism your language of choice uses to tackle concurrency.

Here's why...

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The Books I Read in 2017

The past year, I was able to read 50 books. Some of which I read more than once. Today, I will share with you what I think about all these books. In general, I try to read books which I can directly apply to the things I am interested in - computer science, presenting, personal finance and personal development. Apart from them, I read some fiction books as well, as I find some of them interesting. They help me sleep better at night. But by the end of the year, I realized that there are lessons in some classical fiction books. That is why I tried reading some more uncommon books for me, such as "The Picture of Dorian Grey". I realized that you can learn all the things you read in self-help books, but they are hidden in the stories from fiction books. The information is not so obvious, but if you look closely enough, you can see it. So my goal for next year is to read some of those books as well. Books from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway. Bad thing is, I'm not very good in analyzing texts, so I can't see the lessons those books show me. But, hopefully, at one point I will be able to grasp the gems from them as well. Now, let's look at the list from 2017.
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How to develop the habit of reading books

Throughout all of our lives, we hear people saying that reading books is essential to success. When we were at school, our parents used to tell us how we should read books in order to become smarter. Well, books do grant us with a lot of knowledge. Surely, technology has provided us with other channels for gaining knowledge as well. Channels such as videos and online courses. But books still seem to be the main source for learning new things. However, there seems to be some kind of obstacle, that prevents people from reading books, nowadays. It seems that young people prefer playing video games and watching movies instead. And I am telling this not from observation. I had always preferred to stay in front of my computer and play World of Warcraft all day. When I didn't have a computer, I preferred staying in front of TV watching Cartoon Network.
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Starting the journey…

Greetings, I am Preslav and this is my first ever blog post. So I have had all these ideas for sharing knowledge about different topics about computer science, interesting ideas I encounter in the books I read and some struggles I have had as a software engineer and technical trainer. There is a LOT I would like to talk about and I cannot cover it all in a single blog post. But let me give you some insight on what to expect.
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