"One of the most bizarre and uncomfortable things in the world: being asked to rate one's own book. I'm giving it five stars out of love. I accept that you might differ :)"

"I think it's pretty decent, but I also wrote it so take it with a pinch of salt 😅"

"I'm not sure whether I am able to rate it objectively ...

On one hand, it's IMPRESSIVE. The author dives so deep, that many of the details covered are simply fascinating. But TBH it's the knowledge 99% of software engineers would never ever need. He's talking about performance and observability on such a low level (core cycles, memory paging, cache page alignment) that only creators of very low-level tools will appreciate it.

It's not an easy read. It took me around a month to get through the whole book, driven primarily by my geekiness, but I don't think I'll be able to apply anything of the gained knowledge anytime soon (so I'll probably forget all of that within a month).

It's not that I regret the time spent on USD, but ... it's really hard to recommend it. Unless you're about to build a database engine in C. Or a garbage collector. Or a compiler. :)

"