Posts for: #Textbook

The Pragmatic Programmer (TPP) Notes

#textbook 

About

These are my notes on The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. The book’s website can be found here.

Preface

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.

TPP

  • What makes a pragmatic programmer?

    • Early adopter/fast adopter: try out new technologies & techniques, learn them quickly
    • Inquisitive: ask lots of questions, be continuously learning
    • Critical thinker: think from first principles
    • Realistic: understand the underlying nature of each problem you work on
    • Jack of all trades: be familiar with a broad range of technologies & environments
    • Care about your craft: care about developing software well
    • Think! About your work: never run on auto-pilot, always be critiquing your work in real time

  • Always be making continuous, small improvements (kaizen)

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Understanding Distributed Systems (UDS) Notes

#distributed-systems  #textbook 

About

These are my notes on Roberto Vitillo’s Understanding Distributed Systems. The book’s website can be found here.

Introduction

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know exited can render your own computer unusable.

— Leslie Lamport

  • Motivations for building distributed systems include:
    • High availability: resilience to single-node failures
    • Large workloads that are too big to fit on a single node
    • Performance requirements (e.g. high resolution & low latency for video streaming)

Table of Contents

Part I: Communication

  • We can derive the maximum theoretical bandwidth of a network link by dividing the size of the congestion window by the round trip time:
\[ Bandwidth = WinSize / RTT \]
  • A secure communication link must make 3 guarantees:
    1. Encryption: asymmetric encryption and symmetric encryption (via TLS) are used to ensure that data can only be read by the communicating processes
    2. Authentication: the server and client should each authenticate that the other is who they claim to be, via certificates issued by certificate authorities (CAs)
    3. Integrity: TLS verifies the integrity of the data by calculating a message digest using a secure hash function

Chapter 4: Discovery

  • The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed, hierarchical, and eventually consistent key-value store

Chapter 5: APIs

  • A textual format like JSON is self-describing and human-readable, at the expense of increased verbosity and parsing overhead

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