General Description
A small book, just over 50 PDF pages, resembles more of a lecture summary from some presentations or conferences. The material is presented in text and graphical form. Reading difficulty is easy.
Brief Overview
The material consists not of chapters, but more accurately of lessons. I'll briefly go through each of them.
Textbook on high loads:
- Lesson 1 is dedicated to analyzing systems in general. Comparisons of monolithic and microservice approaches are discussed. The three-tier architecture (frontend, backend, and storage) is mentioned.
- Lesson 2 is dedicated to frontend scaling: serving static content, caching, building architecture, load balancing.
- Lesson 3 is dedicated to backend scaling. Code layers, caching, and similar things are discussed.
- Lesson 4 is dedicated to scaling over time—that is, deferred and asynchronous operations.
- Lesson 5 is dedicated to databases and their scaling. Types of databases, replication, sharding—main topics of the lesson.
- Lesson 6 is called "Reliability, Operation, Patterns of Scalable Architectures" and is dedicated to practices for maintaining and servicing systems. Monitoring and deployment are mentioned.
Opinion
For a summary-style book of 50 pages, the material is quite good and interesting. However, everything is covered exclusively from a theoretical aspect, with a purely top-level view. So you're unlikely to find any specific recommendations here. Also, there are no code examples in the book (well, it's understandable why—the material consists of abstractions and is covered superficially). I would like to see more chapters—lessons, for example, one of them dedicated to specific tools (even if superficially), and another—to testing high-load systems.
