I found Designing Data-Intensive Applications[0] by Martin Kleppman to be the most eye-opening system design book that I've read. He really describes well how a

I found Designing Data-Intensive Applications[0] by Martin Kleppman to be the most eye-opening system design book that I've read. He really describes well how awful things get once you have to coordinate more than one physical machine - the number of things that can go wrong is staggering. I would say this book is as scary as Java Concurrency in Practice was - and that book was scary enough to get our company to change languages. I think one of the best ways to learn software architecture is to have a clear view of what the challenges are, and the Kleppman book does a really good job of providing that clear view. [0]https://dataintensive.net/ https://dataintensive.net/