If you’ve seen this year’s P99 CONF agenda, you know that the stars have aligned nicely. In just two half days, from anywhere you like, you can learn from 60+ outstanding speakers – all sharing performance insights from a broad range of perspectives. Distributed databases, Rust, C++, Go, Wasm, Zig, event streaming architectures, Linux kernel, observability, k8s & more– it’s all on the agenda.
As we were posting the speaker bios, we noticed that our speakers have amassed a rather impressive list of publications, including quite a few books. This blog highlights 14 of those P99 speaker books, which we highly encourage you to read.
Also – once you register for P99 CONF, you’ll gain 30-day full access to the complete O’Reilly library (thanks to O’Reilly, a conference media sponsor). And Manning publications is also a media sponsor. They are offering the P99 CONF community a nice 50% discount on all books, including the three newly released books by P99 CONF speakers. Finally, conference attendees will be eligible to win 99 book bundles, courtesy of P99 CONF, O’Reilly, and Manning.
Designing Data Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition
By Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini
O’Reilly
ETA: December 2025
Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability need to be resolved. In addition, there’s an overwhelming variety of tools and analytical systems, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, plus data warehouses and data lakes. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords?
In this second edition, authors Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini build on the foundation laid in the acclaimed first edition, integrating new technologies and emerging trends. You’ll be guided through the maze of decisions and trade-offs involved in building a modern data system, from choosing the right tools like Spark and Flink to understanding the intricacies of data laws like the GDPR.
- Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn to use them more effectively
- Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools
- Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity
- Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built
- Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures
Chris is co-presenting “Building a Cloud Native LSM on Object Storage” with Rohan Desai. He will also be presenting with Martin Kleppmann at Monster Scale Summit (a new virtual conference by the hosts of P99 CONF).
Bonus: Get a 145-page PDF from the first edition, courtesy of ScyllaDB
Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read
By Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop, with foreword by Bryan Cantrill
ETA: January 2025
Amazon | Manning (use code P992024 for 50% off)
Think how many times you’ve read an engineering blog that’s sparked a new idea, demystified a technology, or saved you from going down a disastrous path. That’s the power of a well-crafted technical article! This practical guide shows you how to create content your fellow developers will love to read and share.
Writing for Developers introduces seven popular “patterns” for modern engineering blogs—such as “The Bug Hunt”, “We Rewrote It in X”, and “How We Built It”—and helps you match these patterns with your ideas. The book covers the entire writing process, from brainstorming, planning, and revising, to promoting your blog and leveraging it into further opportunities. You’ll learn through detailed examples, methodical strategies, and a “punk rock DIY attitude!”:
- Pinpoint topics that make intriguing posts
- Apply popular blog post design patterns
- Rapidly plan, draft, and optimize blog posts
- Make your content clearer and more convincing to technical readers
- Tap AI for revision while avoiding misuses and abuses
- Increase the impact of all your technical communications
Piotr is presenting “Database Drivers: Performance Perspectives.”
Bryan Cantrill (foreword author) is presenting “DTrace at 21.”
Latency: Reduce Delay in Software Systems
By Pekka Enberg
ETA: December 2024
Manning (use code P992024 for 50% off)
Slow responses can kill good software. Whether it’s recovering microseconds lost while routing messages on a server or speeding up page loads that keep users waiting, finding and fixing latency can be a frustrating part of your work as a developer. This one-of-a-kind book shows you how to spot, understand, and respond to latency wherever it appears in your applications and infrastructure.
This book balances theory with practical implementations, turning academic research into useful techniques you can apply to your projects. In Latency you’ll learn:
- What latency is—and what it is not
- How to model and measure latency
- Organizing your application data for low latency
- Making your code run faster
- Hiding latency when you can’t reduce it
Pekka is presenting “Patterns of Low Latency.”
Think Distributed Systems
By Dominik Tornow
ETA: November 2024
Manning (use code P992024 for 50% off)
All modern software is distributed. Let’s say that again—all modern software is distributed. Whether you’re building mobile utilities, microservices, or massive cloud native enterprise applications, creating efficient distributed systems requires you to think differently about failure, performance, network services, resource usage, latency, and much more. This clearly-written book guides you into the mindset you’ll need to design, develop, and deploy scalable and reliable distributed systems.
In Think Distributed Systems you’ll find a beautifully illustrated collection of mental models for:
- Correctness, scalability, and reliability
- Failure tolerance, detection, and mitigation
- Message processing
- Partitioning and replication
- Consensus
Dominik is presenting “Distributed Async Await: A New Programming Model for the Cloud.”
Database Performance at Scale
By Felipe Cardeneti Mendes (P99 CONF speaker), Piotr Sarna (P99 CONF speaker), Pavel Emelyanov, and Cynthia Dunlop
October 2023
Amazon | ScyllaDB (free book)
Discover critical considerations and best practices for improving database performance based on what has worked, and failed, across thousands of teams and use cases in the field. This book provides practical guidance for understanding the database-related opportunities, trade-offs, and traps you might encounter while trying to optimize data-intensive applications for high throughput and low latency.
Whether you’re building a new system from the ground up or trying to optimize an existing use case for increased demand, this book covers the essentials. The ultimate goal of the book is to help you discover new ways to optimize database performance for your team’s specific use cases, requirements, and expectations.
- Understand often overlooked factors that impact database performance at scale
- Recognize data-related performance and scalability challenges associated with your project
- Select a database architecture that’s suited to your workloads, use cases, and requirements
- Avoid common mistakes that could impede your long-term agility and growth
- Jumpstart teamwide adoption of best practices for optimizing database performance at scale
Felipe is presenting “Why Databases Cache, but Caches Go to Disk.”
Piotr is presenting “Database Drivers: Performance Perspectives.”
How to Make Things Faster
By Cary Millsap
June 2023
Amazon | O’Reilly
Slow systems are frustrating. They waste time and money. But making consistently great decisions about performance can be easy, if you understand what’s going on. This book explains in a clear and thoughtful voice why systems perform the way they do. It’s for anybody who’s curious about how computer programs and other processes use their time and about what you can do to improve them.
Through a mix of personal vignettes and technical use cases, Cary Millsap reviews the process of improving performance and provides best practices for optimizing systems efficiently. You’ll learn how to identify the information needed to improve a system, how to find the root causes of performance issues, and how to fix them. You’ll also learn how performance optimization is both a skill set and a mindset, and how to develop both over time.
If you’re a computer professional whose success relies on software that goes fast, by the end of this book you’ll be able to identify, view, scope, analyze, and remedy performance issues with consistency and confidence.
Cary is presenting “Measuring and Diagnosing Performance Shouldn’t Require Magic.”
Learning eBPF
By Liz Rice
March 2023
Amazon | O’Reilly | Isovalent
What is eBPF? With this revolutionary technology, you can write custom code that dynamically changes the way the kernel behaves. It’s an extraordinary platform for building a whole new generation of security, observability, and networking tools.
This practical book is ideal for developers, system administrators, operators, and students who are curious about eBPF and want to know how it works. Author Liz Rice, chief open source officer with cloud native networking and security specialists Isovalent, also provides a foundation for those who want to explore writing eBPF programs themselves.
- Learn why eBPF has become so important in the past couple of years
- Write basic eBPF code, and manipulate eBPF programs and attach them to events
- Explore how eBPF components interact with Linux to dynamically change the operating system’s behavior
- Learn how tools based on eBPF can instrument applications without changes to the apps or their configuration
- Discover how this technology enables new tools for observability, security, and networking
Liz is presenting “Zero-overhead Container Networking with eBPF and Netkit.”
WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide
By Brian Sletten
December 2021
Amazon | O’Reilly
WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide is a thorough and accessible introduction to one of the most transformative technologies hitting our industry. What started as a way to use languages other than JavaScript in the browser has evolved into a comprehensive path toward portability, performance, increased security, and greater code reuse across an impressive collection of deployment targets.
Brian Sletten introduces elements of this technology incrementally while building to several concrete, code-driven examples of practical, cutting-edge WebAssembly uses. Whether you work with enterprise software or embedded systems, or in entertainment, scientific computing, or startup environments, you’ll learn how WebAssembly can have a positive impact on the way you develop software.
- Use WebAssembly to increase code portability across platforms
- Reuse more of your software assets in a wider number of deployment targets
- Learn how WebAssembly increases protection against prominent security attacks
- Use WebAssembly to deploy legacy code in web environments
- Increase your user base across languages and development environments
- Integrate JavaScript code with other languages and environments to improve performance, security, and productivity
- Learn how WebAssembly will affect your career as a software developer
Brian is co-presenting “WebAssembly on the Edge: Sandboxing AND Performance” with Ramnivas Laddad.
The Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects: A Fun, Step-by-Step Walk-Through Guide
By Leandro Melendez
September 2021
Amazon
Here comes the book that will help everyone who always wanted to learn, understand, and deliver load test projects. You will be guided through every phase and sub phase of a traditional load testing project. Holding your hand at every step of the journey, explaining what you should do, the required items, how to gather them, and how to use them.
It’s all explained through fun examples that will help you understand all the complicated technical terms. They will be useful analogies to explain the work to management (or learn it if you are a manager). Each paired up with a translation into the technical boring terms, so you can learn and use the official lingo.
Leandro is presenting “Sight Beyond Sight: See it All Through Observability.”
The Missing README: A Guide for the New Software Engineer
By Chris Riccomini and Dmitriy Ryaboy
Amazon
August 2021
For new software engineers, knowing how to program is only half the battle. You’ll quickly find that many of the skills and processes key to your success are not taught in any school or bootcamp. The Missing README fills in that gap—a distillation of workplace lessons, best practices, and engineering fundamentals that the authors have taught rookie developers at top companies for more than a decade.
You’ll learn:
- How to use the legacy code change algorithm, and leave code cleaner than you found it
- How to write operable code with logging, metrics, configuration, and defensive programming
- How to write deterministic tests, submit code reviews, and give feedback on other people’s code
- The technical design process, including experiments, problem definition, documentation, and collaboration
- What to do when you are on-call, and how to navigate production incidents
- Architectural techniques that make code change easier
- Agile development practices like sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives
Chris is co-presenting “Building a Cloud Native LSM on Object Storage” with Rohan Desai.
Container Security: Fundamental Technology Concepts that Protect Containerized Applications
By Liz Rice
April 2020
Amazon | O’Reilly
To facilitate scalability and resilience, many organizations now run applications in cloud native environments using containers and orchestration. But how do you know if the deployment is secure? This practical book examines key underlying technologies to help developers, operators, and security professionals assess security risks and determine appropriate solutions.
Author Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, looks at how the building blocks commonly used in container-based systems are constructed in Linux. You’ll understand what’s happening when you deploy containers and learn how to assess potential security risks that could affect your deployments. If you run container applications with kubectl or docker and use Linux command-line tools such as ps and grep, you’re ready to get started.
- Explore attack vectors that affect container deployments
- Dive into the Linux constructs that underpin containers
- Examine measures for hardening containers
- Understand how misconfigurations can compromise container isolation
- Learn best practices for building container images
- Identify container images that have known software vulnerabilities
- Leverage secure connections between containers
- Use security tooling to prevent attacks on your deployment
Liz is presenting “Zero-overhead Container Networking with eBPF and Netkit.”
High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication
By Peter Zaitsev
April 2012
O’Reilly
How can you bring out MySQL’s full power? With High Performance MySQL, you’ll learn advanced techniques for everything from designing schemas, indexes, and queries to tuning your MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. This guide also teaches you safe and practical ways to scale applications through replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover.
This book not only offers specific examples of how MySQL works, it also teaches you why this system works as it does, with illustrative stories and case studies that demonstrate MySQL’s principles in action. With this book, you’ll learn how to think in MySQL.
- Learn the effects of new features in MySQL 5.5, including stored procedures, partitioned databases, triggers, and views
- Implement improvements in replication, high availability, and clustering
- Achieve high performance when running MySQL in the cloud
- Optimize advanced querying features, such as full-text searches
- Take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs and solid-state disks
- Explore backup and recovery strategies – including new tools for hot online backups
Peter Zaitsev is presenting “Redis Alternatives Compared.”
Expert Oracle Exadata
By Kerry Osborne (P99 CONF speaker), Randy Johnson, Tanel Pöder (P99 CONF speaker)
August 2011
Expert Oracle Exadata will give you a look under the covers at how the combination of hardware and software that comprise Exadata actually work. Authors Kerry Osborne, Randy Johnson, and Tanel Pöder share their real-world experience, gained through multiple Exadata implementations with the goal of opening up the internals of the Exadata platform. This book is intended for readers who want to understand what makes the platform tick and for whom—”how” it does what it does is as important as what it does. By being exposed to the features that are unique to Exadata, you will gain an understanding of the mechanics that will allow you to fully benefit from the advantages that the platform provides.
- Configure Exadata from the ground up
- Optimize for mixed OLTP/DW workloads
- Migrate large data sets from existing systems
- Connect Exadata to external systems
- Support consolidation strategies using the Resource Manager
- Configure high-availability features of Exadata, including real application clusters (RAC) and automatic storage management (ASM)
- Apply tuning strategies utilizing the unique features of Exadata
Kerry Osborne is presenting “How to Improve Your Ability to Solve Complex Performance Problems: Part 2.”
Tanel Pöder is presenting “Using eBPF Off-CPU Sampling to See What Your Databases are Really Waiting For.”
AspectJ in Action
By Ramnivas Laddad
Manning
September 2009
To allow the creation of truly modular software, OOP has evolved into aspect-oriented programming. AspectJ is a mature AOP implementation for Java, now integrated with Spring.
AspectJ in Action, Second Edition is a fully updated, major revision of Ramnivas Laddad’s best-selling first edition. It’s a hands-on guide for Java developers. After introducing the core principles of AOP, it shows you how to create reusable solutions using AspectJ 6 and Spring 3. You’ll master key features including annotation-based syntax, load-time weaver, annotation-based crosscutting, and Spring-AspectJ integration. Building on familiar technologies such as JDBC, Hibernate, JPA, Spring Security, Spring MVC, and Swing, you’ll apply AOP to common problems encountered in enterprise applications.
Ramnivas is co-presenting “WebAssembly on the Edge: Sandboxing AND Performance” with Brian Sletten.
