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How long would it take to realistically get through all these books? for the average developer... i'm thinking 3-4 years? and this includes taking weekends outs

How long would it take to realistically get through all these books? for the average developer... i'm thinking 3-4 years? and this includes taking weekends outside of work to painfully work through every chapter (+ break weekends since working+studying this in evening would probably lead to burnout in 1 year)

johnnujler 6y ago
I would wager around a year at max. Most materials related to Distributed Systems are information heavy(requiring you to read and remember) as opposed to being math heavy(with the possible exception of graph theory, which usually none of the fundamental texts expect the readers to know). Even many popular papers like raft, paxos, chubby, BitTorrent, gfs etc do not require much mathematical knowledge beyond basic arithmetic. You can read them like a non-fiction and understand most of the things. Not saying that Distributed Systems is easy, doing research in Distributed Systems is very challenging, but I don’t think reading and understanding these materials should be that difficult for an average software engineer.
- ruang 6y ago
  Is linear algebra useful to learn for distributed systems? I'm taking graph theory next semester and wondering what else might be useful. I took a distributed systems course already and we used no math at all.
  - johnnujler 6y ago
    Definitely, may be not directly, but it lies at the heart of software engineering(or more appropriately computer science). It helps with thinking differently, for example I don’t know if ndergrad courses teach distributed search algorithms using eigen vectors and values, but it helps to understand invariants and transformations better.
stuxnet79 6y ago
IMO a better approach would be to read Designing Data Intensive Applications (mentioned a million times on HN) which is more like a high-level map of the field. The references in DDIA are also a goldmine of information. You don't have to read DDIA front to back. Just picking a topic (for instance "Distributed Transactions") is enough to get you started building an intuition about these issues.

johnnujler 6y ago

I would wager around a year at max. Most materials related to Distributed Systems are information heavy(requiring you to read and remember) as opposed to being math heavy(with the possible exception of graph theory, which usually none of the fundamental texts expect the readers to know). Even many popular papers like raft, paxos, chubby, BitTorrent, gfs etc do not require much mathematical knowledge beyond basic arithmetic. You can read them like a non-fiction and understand most of the things. Not saying that Distributed Systems is easy, doing research in Distributed Systems is very challenging, but I don’t think reading and understanding these materials should be that difficult for an average software engineer.

ruang 6y ago
Is linear algebra useful to learn for distributed systems? I'm taking graph theory next semester and wondering what else might be useful. I took a distributed systems course already and we used no math at all.
- johnnujler 6y ago
  Definitely, may be not directly, but it lies at the heart of software engineering(or more appropriately computer science). It helps with thinking differently, for example I don’t know if ndergrad courses teach distributed search algorithms using eigen vectors and values, but it helps to understand invariants and transformations better.

stuxnet79 6y ago

IMO a better approach would be to read Designing Data Intensive Applications (mentioned a million times on HN) which is more like a high-level map of the field. The references in DDIA are also a goldmine of information. You don't have to read DDIA front to back. Just picking a topic (for instance "Distributed Transactions") is enough to get you started building an intuition about these issues.