[rainloft]

This book enabled me to think better from first principles.

e.g. How might I go about optimizing a redshift query? Well, now that I have an idea about how data is laid out on disk, because redshift is a columnar store, if I try to optimize X query, here's how I imagine the index to be so that sequential reads would be faster.

I could find a reference on how to optimize redshift queries, but this book answers the WHY and not just the immediate how.

I've read so many books that were practical, yet became so much less useful over time. (e.g. reading a book about the specifics of the Angular API, whereas now I write mostly React.)

I keep returning back to this book for understanding a top-level view of the fundamentals of distributed systems, specifically data stores.

I hope you give the book a second look at some point.