Great Books and Papers

Books

• A Philosophy of Software Design, John Ousterhout, Professor at Stanford University
• The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
• UNIX - A History and a Memorior, Brian Kernighan, Professor at Princeton University
• HOW NOT TO BE WRONG, Jordan Ellenberg, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• THINKING, FAST AND SLOW, Daniel Kahneman, Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University
• China’s Economy, Arthur R. Kroeber

Papers

There are some papers that are so well written that I really enjoyed reading them. Here is a list of them.

1. In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm
   Decompose the consensus problem into multiple sub-problem and tackle each sub-problem individually

2. Optimizing Space Amplification in RocksDB

   This paper provides a great introduction on LSM-tree, how RocksDB is used as the storage engine for MySQL and some statistics of three LSM-tree based systems used in production in Facebook.

3. BlueCache: A Scalable Distributed Flash-based Key-value Store

   The system design is very clear from the paper. Learned a lot about its index and data store part.

4. What’s Really New with NewSQL?

   Provides a historial view of how we enter into NewSQL and did an excellent survey of state-of-art NewSQL Databases

5. NV-Tree: Reducing Consistency Cost for NVM-based Single Level Systems

   Excellent analysis of overhead in keeping B+ tree consistent, followed by a clear presentation of the proposed solution.

6. The Multi-Queue Replacement Algorithm for Second Level Buffer Caches

   Excellent analysis of re-use distance in second-level cache, to motivate their cache design

7. CAFTL: A Content-Aware Flash Translation Layer Enhancing the Lifespan of Flash Memory based Solid State Drives