Possibly, that's the most hardcore technical book I've ever read. In times of abstractions, when all things are distributed and it's almost impossible to find where your app is running Brendan Gregg has reinvented his own wheel. He's doing what most engineers are dreaming of doing but neither they have time nor interest from their stakeholders. He's getting to the bottom of what comprises the performance.
Screw your Dockers and Prometheuses, with the few exceptions of few self-written scripts and eBPF one-liners the author is using common tools to measure and troubleshoot the performance problems. This book doesn't go too far as trying to solve all issues with GNU utils only, but almost every tool described in the book is battle-tested and has earned its fame long before this book. Gee, it has full chapters on sar & perf.
Whoa, this book is a refresher in the world of abstractions that we live in now. Not sure, how practical this book is for anyone outside of Netflix but nevertheless it's 100% worth your time if you're interested in how things are working under the hood.
As a North Carolina local I can't emphasize more how hyped we're here about the pirate history of our state. Every cove, bay and island that used to be used by the pirates has become a tourist attraction and people are flocking from around the world (myself included) to checkout the Queen's Anne Revenge burial site and where the infamous pirate Blackbeard has lost his head.
This book shouldn't be sold at a pirate-themed amusement park or in a pirate museum souvenir store. The reason is that it tells the cruel thruth about the pirates and takes out the romance that we've been fed through the books and movies. It's main message is that pirates were gangs of thugs looting, killing and torturing whoever was on their way. They weren't pretty princes riding on unicorns fighting the armies of evil, quite the opposite of that.
This is the book you want to read if you want to be real about pirates.
Very practical book on how to reclaim your life from ever increasing digital distractions so you can enjoy it in your own way rather than what Silicone Valley dictates you.
Other books I've read on digital declutter usually focus on how bad social media is. This book is not an exception, however its foundation is very different. It focuses on helping you to build new habits rather than blaming others. I really liked author's ideas on spending more time alone to decompress after spending much time in front of the screen and finding good sustainable hobbies so you don't pull up your phone every time you get bored.
Another great point is that Silicone Valley is constantly fighting for your attention, trying to take you out of real life and replace it with a digital screenery. If you don't resist you'll become just another source of income for their well-oiled soulsucking machine.
At first sight this book is complimentary to two great books by David Goggins, plus a bunch of lists of steps to follow. David's books bring a much more powerful message, however his stories are pretty rough. This book has a much better language and is easier to read, and it definitely has its value though its message is secondary to Goggins' books. I had fun reading it though
I have mixed feelings towards this book. It's both boring and entertaining. I had to skip some parts of it explaining the technical details of certain stock market operations and at the same time I craved more details on the IEX stock exchange founding story.
I'd rather have this book in the form of a blogpost.
I don't know how it's possible but I haven't heard about this book before starting to read it and it was a 100% impulsive buy. How blind I was! It turned out to be a lowkey sleeping beauty.
That's a practical book that works best for people who like to be hands on with what they read. In this aspect it reminds me of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen as similarly to the latter it's instanly motivated me to use what I learned from the book in my daily life. What's also similar to GTD is that I was immediately able to reap the benefits from reading this book.
This book is highly practical and gives you working recipes how to be productive and live to the fullest without being constantly stressed, distracted and living in fear that you're missing something.
I had to force myself to start reading this book due to the amount of explicit language used by the author. That's probably the first book I've read in more than 20 years that contains curse words. However, I don't think that the kids will be reading it. As an adult I'm fine with that.
Author's story of starting from the bottom has really touched my soul. In today's world where people are often avoiding the difficulties by all means this book is really pushing the idea of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" to the limits of what a human can do by making the reader to embrace the failures. Every failure should make you calloused so next time you fail it won't hurt you.
What's also really interesting is how the author was able to completely avoid bringing any right or left ideology to his book. Given his background as a Navy recruiter and the fact that the author ruminates on the subject of how his despises weak people I really love that the book is clear of politics.
This book will suit if you're a history buff like me. Especially, if you're interested in how economics and history can correllate and influence each other. Well, maybe not so much if you live outside of US as it's solely focused on the US economy. However, as big as it is now the massiveness of the US economy became a thing only after economies of all former hegemons failed which is relatively recent.
This book starts from the good and bad things that happened during the Great Depression and doesn't cover the premises of why the 19th century was so fundamental for building the world's biggest economy.
However, if you're not interested in the historical part of the book it can be condensed to a very few principles:
Former history won't give you answers to the questions of the future.
Use common sense for decision-making, others make mistakes.
Live beyond your means, no one cares what car do you drive.
Those who have good money habits and perseverance will prevail no matter what failures they may face in the process.
Personally, it took me more than 6 months to finish this book from the moment when I saw it at the bookshelf at Malta airport until the moment when I was done with all its additions and appendexes. That's definitely my fault, not the book's as it's very pleasant to read unless you want to practice every single concepts that it's aiming to teach you.
That's not the first book on personal productivity I've read throughout the years, but surprisingly, many approaches that this book is teaching you were fresh and new to me.
In my opinion, it's beneficial to follow the "practice what you preach" idea with this book as most concepts given in it are easy to follow and if I hadn't then I'd have forgotten all of them after turning the last page of the book. Even though I'm early on my journey of applying in practice what I've read here, I'm already seeing the benefits of it and starting to feel like a better person.
I've binged-read this book cover to cover in less than a week. I don't remember much about what was happening over the last 7 days besides taking a first look at illustrations in Barnes&Noble to turning the last page.
This book feels like a not-so-short digest of most exciting things that've happened over the last two decades: from dotcom boom of early 2000's to the AI boom and Twitter meltdown. It's fascinating to be told that you've witnessed a whole epoch all lead by a bunch of folks squeezed between San Jose and San Francisco. A true power house built by engineers and techno visioneers that radiates its ideas to the rest of the world.
Personally, I find this book an ode to the American Dream. How thanks to hard work and dedication someone can really change the mankind's history by being the right person at the right time. Trully, an epitome to the American Dream.
Not sure what happened with this book. Either I'm reading it late in my life of the book is completely outdated and everything it teaches you can be read in other much better books.
A few blog posts about contemporary pop psychology; time management and whatever the "Secret" is supposed to teach you is wrapped into a novel sprinkled with some heavy hallucinogens here.
I resented reading this book due to its notoriety and agressive marketing across both online and offline. This wasn't worth it.
It's very surprising that's not one of Tim Ferriss' books, looks like the author has a background similar to Tim's and was inspired by him as well. However, this book gives answers and most Tim's books left me with more questions than before I started to read them. I wish I read this book in my early 20s, but having learned most of its content the hard way makes me appreciate this book even more as it resonates a lot with my life experience.
If I condense the whole book in a bullet list, that'd be
Life is futile, give up trying to be exceptional
If you need to get the shit done, instead of trying to motivate yourself JFDI!
Suffering is inevitable, embrace it
Have realistic goals and values
You can be wrong, keep questioning yourself
Embrace rejection: it's OK to say no and receive the same is return
I'll split this book into 2 main parts: the importance of 1:1s & how to conduct them and depiction of really impressive author's experience after working in multiple high-tech companies where he had to deal with a lot of stress and challenges that're the main attributes of every growing company.
The book is very well-written, if I were in the business of allusions to dishes this particular book would be a molecular caviar. Standing on shoulders of giants of the past, with a pinch of bleeding edge terminology and references to the companies that are hot.
If I condense the whole book in a bullet list, that'd be
Conduct 1:1s, no matter what
Embrace the change, it's inevitable
Trust to delegate or you'd crumble under load
Find time to innovate
Be enthusiastic about what you do and either lead or leave
This book was recommended on one of Motley Fool's shows as a visionary book that perfectly describes what the future holds for us in terms of technological progress.
Well, after reading it I'm pretty sure that the person that recommended it is not an engineer. That's not a book from any well-known futurist, rather from a tech reporter that keeps his hand on pulse of latest and greatest tech. He doesn't peek in the distant future, instead he's trying to find what trends will prevail in the following decades. AR/AI/VR, yada yada yada. Pretty boring if you ask me. I liked one point though: the word "protopia" that's a shorter way to say that the only constant is change.
My score is 2/5. Better read a bunch of twitter posts by Elon Musk
