Books still worth reading in the AI era

This book by Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini explains how systems that store and process data really work, from indexes inside a single database to consensus across dozens of nodes. Rather than surveying specific products, it examines the principles they are built on, so after reading it the…

Robert Martin (Uncle Bob) brings together ideas he developed over decades: from SOLID to component principles and the famous diagram of concentric circles. The book's central idea: architecture is about keeping business logic independent of details, so that decisions about the database, UI, or…

The Ukrainian translation of the well-known book Grokking Algorithms (published by ArtHuss). The author explains algorithms through illustrations and everyday examples, so the book is easy to read even without a technical background. The code examples are written in Python and are short, so they…

The first volume of Alex Xu's popular series (in its second edition). Each chapter is a standalone problem worked through using the same framework: clarify the requirements, make estimates, sketch a high-level design, then dig into the bottlenecks. Plenty of diagrams and very little fluff.

Vlad Khononov explains Domain-Driven Design from strategy to code: how to analyze a business domain, split a system into bounded contexts, and choose the right level of implementation complexity for each part. It also covers how DDD relates to microservices, event-driven architecture, and data mesh.

Eric Evans's "Blue Book" introduced concepts that are hard to imagine discussing architecture without today: ubiquitous language, bounded context, aggregate, and context map. It teaches you to build a domain model together with the business and to keep your code aligned with that model.

The second, fully rewritten edition of the classic book on microservices. Newman treats them not as a fad but as a tool with a price: he explains how to draw service boundaries correctly, how services should communicate, and what changes in testing, deployment, security, and team structure.

Chris Richardson, the author of microservices.io, describes a pattern language for microservice architecture and demonstrates each pattern using a single food delivery application. The code examples are in Java and Spring, but the ideas are easy to transfer to any stack.

A book about the hardest decisions in distributed systems - the ones that have no "best practices", only trade-offs. The authors show how to approach such decisions systematically: from how granular services should be to who owns the data and how to keep it consistent. Everything is explained…

The second edition of the classic book by Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group. Cagan describes how product teams work at the strongest tech companies and why most products fail before the first line of code is written: teams build what has already been decided up front instead of testing…

Marty Cagan, author of Inspired, and Chris Jones of the Silicon Valley Product Group write about what sets strong tech companies apart from the rest. The key difference is not in processes or frameworks, but in how teams are set up: "feature teams" execute decisions made by others, while…

Will Larson, an engineering leader who has worked at Stripe, Uber, and Calm, explains who staff engineers are and what they actually do. The first part covers the role itself and the skills it requires; the second consists of interviews with staff- and principal-level engineers from a variety of…