Welcome to our first book review of the e-Merge Book Club. Each month we’ll be reviewing an IT-related book that Dev’s will hopefully find pertinent and interesting (even if the rest of the world have no idea what it’s all about).
For July, we’ll be reviewing Michael Nygard’s book, Release IT! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (2007). Nygard is a well-known American programmer and software architect and has delivered running systems to the U.S Government as well as various industries like banking, finance, agriculture, and retail for over 15 years now.
The first edition of the book was released in 2007, and its byline was “if you’re a developer and don’t want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.” It received good reviews but many people said it focussed too much on Java and didn’t have enough real-life examples to make it practical.
Nygard re-released the book as a 2nd Edition earlier this year and he describes it as an “industry-standard that shows you how to create systems that run longer, with fewer failures, and recover better when bad things happen.” The latest edition covers topics like DevOps, microservices, and cloud-native architecture as well as chaos engineering, and how to apply randomness and deliberate stress to reveal systematic problems.
The blurb best describes it as a book that will teach you to “build systems that survive the real world, avoid downtime, implement zero-downtime upgrades and continuous delivery, and make cloud-native applications resilient. Examine ways to architect, design, and build software – particularly distributed systems – that stands up to the typhoon winds of a flash mob, a Slashdotting, or a link on Reddit. Take a hard look at software that failed the test and find ways to make sure your software survives.”
The new edition has many more real-life code examples than the first edition, making it a much more practical read. 72% of reviewers on Amazon.com gave it a 5 out of 5-star rating, and generally felt it was an excellent read for Devs out there.
We think it’s a user-friendly, detailed guide to dealing with programming and software development do’s and don’ts in the highly virtual world of 2017, and that it’s well-worth the read.
Have you read the book? Let us know, we’d love to hear your comments on the book.
