Books

book 23

• Building a Debugger Sy Brand walks through writing a Linux debugger in C++ — ptrace, breakpoints, DWARF unwinding
• Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems Bernstein's out-of-print, freely distributed source text on serializability, 2PL, MVCC and recovery
• Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport Annotated reader of Lamport's papers — clocks, Byzantine Generals, Paxos, TLA+ — with commentary
• Database Design and Implementation Sciore's build-it-as-you-read course growing SimpleDB from disk pages up to a working RDBMS
• Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work Petrov's two-part survey of storage engines and the distributed side of database systems
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (2nd ed.) Kleppmann on the tradeoffs behind storage engines, replication, and stream processing
• Fault-Tolerant Design Dubrova's graduate intro to failure modes, redundancy and reliability metrics, hardware-first
• Feedback Control for Computer Systems Janert teaching PID loops and stability theory to engineers building autoscalers and rate limiters
• Hacker's Delight (2nd ed.) Warren's catalog of branchless integer and bit-level tricks that compilers reach for
• High Performance Browser Networking Grigorik on the TCP, TLS, HTTP/2 and WebRTC mechanics behind browser page-load speed
• Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk Hardware-level walk through SRAM cache organization, DDR DRAM timing and disk scheduling
• On Transactional Concurrency Control Graefe reframing 2PL, OCC, MVCC and snapshot isolation under one coherent model
• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces Free Arpaci-Dusseau OS textbook built around virtualization, concurrency and persistence
• Readings in Database Systems (5th ed., the Red Book) The Red Book — annotated database-papers reading list with the editors' framing essays
• Replication: Theory and Practice Survey volume on primary-backup, state-machine replication and atomic broadcast
• Systems Performance Gregg's Linux performance methodology — USE method, flame graphs, eBPF tracing tools
• The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis Jain's 1991 textbook on experimental design, queueing models and statistics for benchmarking
• The Art of Multiprocessor Programming Herlihy and Shavit on linearizability, lock-free structures, and the consensus hierarchy
• The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management The standard GC survey, 2nd edition adding post-2010 low-pause collectors like ZGC and Shenandoah
• Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques Gray and Reuter end to end on locking, logging, two-phase commit and fault tolerance
• Understanding Software Dynamics Sites on measuring what software really does on a machine, via the KUtrace kernel tracer
• Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and Processes Smith and Nair's taxonomy of process VMs and system VMs, from ISA to application level
• Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read Sarna and Dunlop on picking topics, structuring and shipping technical blog posts