Books I read in 2016
03 Feb 2017This is not a book review, just a summary of my personal opinions of book I read in 2016.
Big Data Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems
This is a great book about Lambda Architecture, the author of the book is also the creator of Aapche Storm and Cascalog. Half of the book is about high level abstraction of Lamda Architecture(like why and when you should implement such system), and the other half is example of how to implement Landa Architecture in Storm and Cascalog. I would recommend this book to those who at least have some experiences in big data. You can pick only the part you are interested in, like you can completetly skip Storm or Cascalog if you are try to implement Landa Architechture in other tools. I personally like the strucutre of this book, it provides options to the readers of how much details you want to get into.
Advance Analytics with Spark
I feel this is the perfect book for a software engineer to getting start with Apache Spark , and maybe one of the best Spark book on the market right now. It’s not a big book, it only got 260 pages but it covers enough details for building a simple data pipeline with Spark. It’s a also a good book to keep as a reference, it got tables of different RDD operations which I found extreamly usefule if you are woking with Spark a lot.
The Well-Grounded Java Developer
I got this book about two years ago, and didn’t have a chance to fininsh it until recently. There are so many java books out there, and most of them are oudated. This one is forced on ‘new’ feature from Java7, and like its title, it’s fairly Well-Gournded. It covers the latest development of Java language such as new language features, what’s new in compiler and some popular libraris and frameworks. Personally I found it’s really hard to fininsh a book about a specific language. Like Thinking in Java is a great Java book, but it also gives you tons of details that you are not sure if you will need all of them. And becuase of those language details, fininshing such a book is kinda time consuming. For this book, it goes a bit deeper than other Java books, which make it a bit more interesting to read. It’s not the go-to Java book for first timers, it’s more for those know Java but didn’t touch it since Java6.
The art of monitoring
This is a very detailed/tutorial like book for building a mointor system. It’s a perfect book if you are the first devop to build the mointor system in your company. When I first bought the book, I was looking for something higher level about how to mointor a distrubuted system. It comes with a lot of details of how to deployment different kinds of mointoring tools like Riemann, Graphite and Grafana. I would recommend this book to those are new to devop world.