I run a little email book club reading the highest-caliber books that we might otherwise be intimidated to read on our own; typically covering topics in databases, distributed systems, and software performance.
We are currently reading Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces.
There are over 2,500 members from around the world and between 300-800 join for any given book. Members include undergrads, grad students, early-career programmers, experienced programmers, founders, and everyone in between. Everyone who is interested is welcome to join.
I try to always find interesting and experienced discussion leaders of diverse backgrounds that help make the discussions the most valuable part of the club, even beyond the books themselves.
Sign up here to stay in the loop.
How it works
All discussion is via a Google Group. There will be no Zoom or Google Hangout, it will purely be over text email.
Each weekend, one person will send out an email recapping the chapter or asking questions to start discussion. It can be as short as a paragraph or two just to get discussion going. Anyone else can chime in afterward.
I will solicit these chapter discussion leaders before we start each new book.
Loose criteria
The focus is on books that would be interesting and useful to senior+ developers (whatever that means to you), though anyone is welcome.
- Between 350-550 pages
- Focused on a specific software topic, not on philosophy of software in general
- Generally not textbooks
- Completable in around 3 months reading 1-2 chapters per week
Potential future books
- The Garbage Collection Handbook (2nd Edition)
- Designing Data Intensive Applications (2nd Edition)
- High Performance Browser Networking
- Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport
- Fault Tolerant Design
- Replication: Theory and Practice
- The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis
- Virtual Machines
- On Transactional Concurrency Control
- Feedback Control for Computer Systems
- Hacker's Delight (2nd Edition)
- Transaction Processing
- Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk
- Building a Debugger
- Readings in Database Systems
Have a book that fits the above criteria? Let me know!