[star_juice]

I've heard it recommended before, but some have mentioned it's overly theoretical and doesn't offer much in the way of helping you build working examples of the material (although I suppose the complexity of the material does make toy examples a bit tricky to come up with). Do you know of anything that does have such offerings?

[keeeeeeeem]

It's not exactly what you're asking for but if you want to grok distributed systems and managing workloads then learning some Erlang/Elixir (OTP runtime) really helped me, as you can "code along" with your book of choice and they handle real-world situations like node failure and backpressure management.

Other topics that come to mind are books about building out microservice architectures. There are certainly plenty of war stories out there and micro-services seem to tend towards re-implementing OTP runtime primitives in arbitrary languages as design patterns, so you get even more of a feel for what's going on at a lower level of abstraction.