I'm excited to share Understanding Distributed Systems: a modern introduction to building distributed large scale applications that brings together theory and real-world practice
[1]. It's the guide I wish existed when I first started out.
Although there is plenty of information out there — like academic papers, engineering blogs, and even books on the subject — if you were to put it on a spectrum from theory to practice, you would find that there is a lot of material at the two ends, but not much in the middle. The book tries to fill that space.
The book is divided into 5 parts (communication, coordination, scalability, resiliency, testing, and operations) and 21 chapters. Although it's complete in its current form, I plan to add a lot more content to it in the future (e.g., CRDTs, control planes, and Byzantine consensus). You can download a sample with the first two chapters from the book's landing page [1].
Maybe "practical" is more appropriate than "modern" :)
Among other things, the book discusses topics such rate limiting, testing, monitoring, and observability. Those are important topics that I found to be mostly mentioned in passing in traditional textbooks.
The intent is to give the reader an idea of the breadth of the field so that they can go read and learn more about specific topics they find interesting.
"Understanding Distributed Systems" tries to bring together theoretical aspects on the topic (like consensus and consistency models) with practical ones, such as resiliency mechanisms, asynchronous messaging, and observability.
It’s not a best seller, but thanks to it, I connected with engineers all over the world who I would never have met otherwise.
https://understandingdistributed.systems/