Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud

Before I started some analysis on benchmarking various popular file systems on Linux I was recommended to read "Systems Performance: Enterprise  and the Cloud" by Brendan Gregg.

In today's modern server and cloud based systems the multi-layered complexity can make it hard to pin point performance issues and bottlenecks. This book is packed full useful analysis techniques covering tracing, kernel internals, tools and benchmarking.

Critical to getting a well balanced and tuned system are all the different components, and the book has chapters covering CPU optimisation (cores, threading, caching and internconnects),  memory optimisation (virtual memory, paging, swapping, allocators, busses),  file system I/O, storage, networking (protcols, sockets, physical connections) and typical issues facing cloud computing.

The book is full of very useful examples and practical instructions on how to drill down and discover performance issues in a system and also includes some real-world case studies too.

It has helped me become even more focused on how to analyse performance issues and consider how to do deep system instrumentation to be able to understand where any why performance regressions occur.

All-in-all, a most systematic and well written book that I'd recommend to anyone running large complex servers and cloud computing environments.

The Git Community Book

The Git Community Book (maintained by Scott Chacon) is an excellent resource to help one learn how to use the Git version control system quickly and with minimal pain. The book includes a Git introduction, First Time use instructions, Basic Usage tutorial through to Advanced Git usage and also describes the internals and plumbing of Git too.

The book is available as browsable web pages or as a PDF too. Most excellent!

Compilers Dragon Book

While on a short vacation over in Kent my wife and I have been visiting various second hand book shops in Whitstable and Canterbury.

I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a hard backed copy of "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools" (Aho, Sethi, Ullman ISBN: 0321486811) also know as "The Dragon Book" which is the definitive compiler techniques undergraduate book - it is the compiler writers' Bible. The Amazon reviews on this tome speak for themselves.

The amusing thing was that last week I was rummaging around my book collection and could not find my original paper back copy and recalled I loaned it to somebody and never got it back and realised that buying another new copy would be an expensive proposition.

Well, the copy I just acquired is in near mint condition - I suspect the student who bought read the first chapter and then gave up since this book requires some intellectual effort to work through. I got it for £3.65 which is a little cheaper than the £50.99 being asked for the hardback copy at Amazon.co.uk. Result!

For those who haven't read this book, sample chapters can be found here. Also, the errata sheet for the book can be found here.

Git Version Control Books

Sometimes events occur like buses turning up: not a lot of activity and then suddenly two or three arrive in one go. Well, I can gladly say this applies to quality books on Git.

Several weeks ago I received from Amazon my long awaited copy of "Version Control with Git: Powerful tools and techniques for collaborative software development" by Jon Loeliger. For about £18 and at 328 pages it's fairly good value; it contains a good deal of tutorial style hands-on examples and also the in-depth know-how that one expects from a good technical book. Not bad at all really.

 Today my colleague Amit twittered about another Git book "Pro Git" (Amazon, £19.24) by Scott Chacon and published by Apress. This book is available on-line under the Creative Commons license as well in printed form too. The great feature of this book is that it's been put up on GitHub and then forked and translated into other languages such as German, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Anyhow, this looks to be another great Git book, and well worth looking at too.

So now there's no excuse for not getting to grips with git - here are a couple of quality text books to help new and experienced uses with daily git usage!

Version Control with Git

At last, my long awaited Amazon pre-ordered book "Version Control with Git" (ISBN: 978-0-596-52012-0) arrived a couple of days ago. I quickly read the first couple of chapters over the weekend. It's very readable, has plenty of worked examples and has over 300 pages of goodness in it.

It has little side notes about traps one can fall into, which are helpful to git novice and git guru alike.

Looks like a worthwhile addition to my ever growing O'Reilly book collection!