Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann, Chris Riccomini

Genres: Computer Science, Programming, Technology, Software, Engineering, Technical, Nonfiction

1194 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 17, 2026

Reviews

[Roger March · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful...

There are few technical books where I am awed by the breath and depth of the content; this is one. I learned many new things in areas that I thought I knew well, and got a great introduction in places I didn't. All in all, a real pleasure.

[Ruth Cao · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a book so highly regarded it was surprisingly useless. It also does not explain concepts very well, unless you’re already familiar with said concepts before. It likes to use the most verbose and complicated explanations, so it’s not really a good book to learn from. Also, I really hate how this book would explain something in a footnote or 5-paragraphs and then constantly return back to it and you would have to try either figure out what that footnote means or reread the 5 -paragraphs to remember what they were even talking about. It’s honestly a book written for people who already have experience doing what this book is talking about. There was maybe some nice ideas on categorizing different databases, but it did not justify the length of the book or dense paragraphs of text you have to sift through. Honestly, it sort of read like a professor’s lecture with its verbosity and indirectness. Which makes sense because the author is a professor at Cambridge. I guess the only good thing reading this is realizing that not every classic technical book is relevant or good for learning

[Kiryll Kadyrka · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Thomas Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

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!

[Soros Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

慕名而来的神作，第二版整体看下来挺好的（感谢GT的free O'Reilly access)。前面几章已经比较熟悉了，和工作经验也都对应得上，后面从batch processing开始的几章还挺mind-blowing的。