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Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
670 pages, Paperback
Published March 24, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 30, 2026
A must-read for anyone interested in distributed systems (anyone who doesn't believe AI agents can solve all their software engineering problems, that is). Having read the first edition multiple times, I still found the new edition refreshing. I especially liked the rewrites of the consistency and streaming architecture chapters, which make the complex concepts easier to understand. This is a book I enjoy reading from cover to cover, while also keeping on my bookshelf as a reference. The only sad news is that the Tolkien-style maps are gone, so it is staying on my Kindle shelf only.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Read the book in early access via O’Reilly Learning. Just a great next step after the first edition. Not much has changed, but I really loved the new book’s structure and a refresh about some topics, e.g., cloud databases. I still consider this book to be the most important book in software engineering, and the second edition is a meticulously polished version of the book that’s still relevant these days - after 10 years.
April 5, 2026
A great, thoughtful read which feels at times more like a history of software engineering book than anything else. This book is more suited towards someone with lots of experience than those just joining the industry and examines issues at both the microscopic (intimate details about how databases work) as well as the macroscopic but never really at a practical resolution. Overall a great but long read!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews