P99 CONF has unintentionally turned into a nice gathering of book authors and book lovers. Here’s a look at featured books related to this year’s conference — touching on topics like AI engineering, distributed systems, database performance, latency, and even sci-fi/fantasy fiction!
Get your free pass to P99 CONF (fully virtual)
Once you register for the conference (it’s free + virtual), 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 sweet 50% discount on any 2 or more P99 CONF-related books.
One more bookworm bonus: conference attendees who participate in the speaker chat will be eligible to win book bundles.
AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models
By Chip Huyen
Amazon | O’Reilly
This book discusses AI engineering: the process of building applications with readily available foundation models. It starts with an overview of AI engineering, explaining how it differs from traditional ML engineering and discussing the new AI stack. The more AI is used, the more opportunities there are for catastrophic failures, and therefore, the more important evaluation becomes. This book discusses different approaches to evaluating open-ended models, including the rapidly growing AI-as-a-judge approach.
AI application developers will discover how to navigate the AI landscape, including models, datasets, evaluation benchmarks, and the seemingly infinite number of use cases and application patterns. You’ll learn a framework for developing an AI application, starting with simple techniques and progressing toward more sophisticated methods, and discover how to efficiently deploy these applications.
- Understand what AI engineering is and how it differs from traditional machine learning engineering
- Learn the process for developing an AI application, the challenges at each step, and approaches to address them
- Explore various model adaptation techniques, including prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, agents, and dataset engineering, and understand how and why they work
- Examine the bottlenecks for latency and cost when serving foundation models and learn how to overcome them
- Choose the right model, dataset, evaluation benchmarks, and metrics for your needs
Chip is presenting “Effective Coding and Working with Agents.”
Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications
By Chip Huyen
Amazon | O’Reilly
Machine learning systems are both complex and unique. Complex because they consist of many different components and involve many different stakeholders. Unique because they’re data dependent, with data varying wildly from one use case to the next. In this book, you’ll learn a holistic approach to designing ML systems that are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and adaptive to changing environments and business requirements.
Chip considers each design decision – such as how to process and create training data, which features to use, how often to retrain models, and what to monitor – in the context of how it can help your system as a whole achieve its objectives. The iterative framework in this book uses actual case studies backed by ample references.
This book will help you tackle scenarios such as:
- Engineering data and choosing the right metrics to solve a business problem
- Automating the process for continually developing, evaluating, deploying, and updating models
- Developing a monitoring system to quickly detect and address issues your models might encounter in production
- Architecting an ML platform that serves across use cases
- Developing responsible ML systems
Chip is presenting “Effective Coding and Working with Agents.”
Fast by Default: Practical Performance Engineering
By Den Odell
Amazon | Manning (use code P99CONF for 45% off or bundle for 50%)
You can prevent most software performance problems if you recognize their predictable patterns. This book introduces author Den Odell’s Fast by Default model that replaces the slow fix-it-later path with a unique framework to build in performance from the start.
Den Odell’s System Paths framework provides a universal diagnostic language for performance that works across any platform or stack to keep your systems fast even as your codebase, team, and user base grow. You’ll work through hands-on examples like slow internal dashboards and cascading problems from a degraded API. Effective profiling tools, shared dashboards, CI budgets, and design reviews all ensure your performance goals are user-centered and your team is aligned and accountable.
Den is presenting “Keep the Browser’s Main Thread Free”
Mastering Programming: From Testing to Performance in Go
By Daniel Lemire
Amazon
This book is tailored for programmers eager to elevate their software development expertise beyond foundational skills, empowering them to craft code that is not only correct and efficient but also aligned with organizational goals. With a deep dive into unit testing, concurrency management using Go’s goroutines, and performance optimization, the author bridges the gap between low-level technical details—like memory and processor mechanics—and high-level algorithm design principles.
Through hands-on examples in Go and Python, alongside advanced techniques such as fuzzing, mutexes, and atomic operations, this book delivers a practical, no-nonsense approach to organizing workflows, ensuring robust code quality, and preventing regressions. It tackles the intricacies of parallelism and synchronization in complex projects head-on, offering solutions to real-world challenges. Each chapter concludes with targeted exercises to solidify understanding, making this an indispensable, all-in-one resource for driven developers aiming to excel in modern programming.
Daniel is presenting “Billion-Query-Per-Second Lookup Tables in C++: Compile-Time Perfect Hashing” along with Francisco Geiman Thiesen.
Think Distributed Systems
By Dominik Tornow
Amazon | Manning (use code P99CONF for 45% off or bundle for 50%)
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 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 “The Prompt is the Platform.”
Database Performance at Scale
By Felipe Cardeneti Mendes, Piotr Sarna, Pavel Emelyanov, and Cynthia Dunlop
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 “How ScyllaDB Eliminates Read Amplification at Scale.”
Pavel is presenting “My Fair Shares: Teaching a Flat Scheduler About Hierarchy.”
Cynthia will be frantically typing in the conference chat.
Thiefcatcher
By S. G. Karam
Signed Copies | Amazon
In Azoria, sanctioned heists were once a city-wide spectacle, until the year-long ban scattered Lars Harrow’s crew and left their legend in ruins.
Now the ban is over, and a single daring job could restore their place among the greats. But the streets have changed. A masked thiefcatcher hunts the city’s former stars with ruthless precision, and when one of Lars’s own vanishes, the comeback turns into a fight for survival.
In a city where thieves once played heroes, the only thing more dangerous than losing is what they must become to win.
If you enjoyed Six of Crows, Mistborn, Arcane, or The Lies of Locke Lamora, you won’t be able to put down this electrifying tale of ambition, greed, betrayal, and redemption.
Steve will be presenting “Performance has Layers.”
Latency: Reduce Delay in Software Systems
By Pekka Enberg
Amazon | Manning | ScyllaDB (free chapters) (use code P99CONF for 45% off or bundle for 50%)
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 delivered the “Patterns of Low Latency” keynote at P99 CONF 2024. His co-founder Glauber Costa will be hosting a chat with io_uring creator Jens Axboe this year, and Turso’s Senior Software Engineer Pere Diaz will be talking about “Breaking SQLite’s Single-Writer Bottleneck.”
Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read
By Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop
Amazon | Manning (use code P99CONF for 45% off or bundle for 50%)
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
P99 CONF presenters Amos Wenger, Sam Rose, Glauber Costa, and Gunnar Morling are featured in this book.
ScyllaDB in Action
By Bo Ingram
Amazon | Manning | ScyllaDB (free chapters) (use code P99CONF for 45% off or bundle for 50%)
ScyllaDB in Action is your guide to everything you need to know about ScyllaDB, from your very first queries to running it in a production environment. It starts you with the basics of creating, reading, and deleting data and expands your knowledge from there. You’ll soon have mastered everything you need to build, maintain, and run an effective and efficient database.
This book teaches you ScyllaDB the best way—through hands-on examples. Dive into the node-based architecture of ScyllaDB to understand how its distributed systems work, how you can troubleshoot problems, and how you can constantly improve performance. You’ll learn how to:
- Read, write, and delete data in ScyllaDB
- Design database schemas for ScyllaDB
- Write performant queries against ScyllaDB
- Connect and query a ScyllaDB cluster from an application
- Configure, monitor, and operate ScyllaDB in production
Bo and his Discord colleagues are frequent presenters at P99 CONF’s sister conference, Monster Scale Summit.
