What books would you recommend for people new to Redis?

[estherschindler]

I’m working on a blog post about this topic. I’d love to hear your suggestions!

• What book(s) should someone read to come up to speed?
• Why do you recommend that one?

Note that the books don’t have to be peculiar to Redis. For example, someone suggested Designing Data-Intensive Applications because “It’s a great general purpose guide to data storage technologies, why people use the different things, a great dose of historical context, and similar.”

Or to put it another way: What book do you wish you’d read before you got started?

[Dani]

I'm not really a book person. I learned Redis just by reading the official documentation, doing, and lots and lots of experimenting and discovering. Redis-based Github repos are really good places to learn different real world applications. I think certain technologies just don't translate well to being completely explained in print.

I'm currently just using Redis for some persistent caching but I'm going to start integrating it into DaniWeb's live chat functionality soon for its pub/sub functionality.

[estherschindler]

I suspect fewer people are "book persons" than there used to be.

This makes me sad, particularly because my name is on the spine of about a dozen books.

[Dani]

I think it has a lot to do with the topic. With programming technologies, I prefer to consume content online because it makes it easy to copy and paste code snippets, play around with them in my IDE, follow links in articles to other relevant libraries and APIs, download GitHub repos, etc. All of that would not be possible if I take a book off my bookshelf and sit down on the sofa.

[Dani]

I’ll also add that my husband is an engineering manager at Apple, and he is a huge proponent of listening to eBooks on his commute. The books he listens to, however, aren’t programming concepts that can really only be fully grasped by typing out and executing code in your IDE, as I think is the case with Redis. His books tends to be self-help type books relevant to his career, like how to be a better technical manager or how to advance your career in Silicon Valley.

I just think programming concepts just aren’t really conducive to a print medium. Sorry.

[Dani]

These are the only physical books that I have:

High Performance MySQL, Taking Down Goliath, Indistractable, and Social Media Analytics are all signed copies given to me by their authors, who are all either business colleagues or personal friends of mine.

[estherschindler]

I do grok the reasons, but it still makes me sad.

My name is on the spine of a dozen technology books, so I do have some skin in the game. But your reasoning is why I stopped writing books!

[estherschindler]

Just to close the loop: We published the blog post!

The 6 Books New Redis Developers Should Read
Just getting started with Redis? These books help you grasp the technical essentials and smooth the learning curve.
https://redis.com/blog/6-books-new-redis-developers-should-read/

[Dani]

Thank you for following up with the direction you took the article in. I'm curious if, of all the places you sourced book recommendations from, we were the only ones to give so much pushback against paperback?

[estherschindler]

Paper copies didn't come up in other conversations. More commonly the responses were, "I don't read books anymore, just online help text and articles." Which wasn't super useful for constructing a book list!

[rproffitt]

With a steep decline in the use of books, today I read about "Chuck Finley" and how the people behind this scheme tried to save library books from being burned in Florida.

If you have want to have books in the future, you may want to find a way to support libraries soon.

[estherschindler]

Oh I'm with you on that topic, @rproffitt! But it's off the topic of, "Which books can help you get up to speed on [subject]?"!

[rproffitt]

My bookshelf is small now. About 2010 I moved from Boston area to here and it was my impetus to cull the library. While there's about 4 more books such as Horowitz and Hill's The Art Of Electronics and a 1907 textbook Euclid Book I-III Hall & Stevens not shown I too find myself not wanting to add more to the collection.

The reason for the 1907 book was because it's been interesting to use as source material for those that worked on a project I was on. Developers would tell me they found a new way to do something so I would remember it was in the 1907 textbook. Many projects used C and when folk would tell me how hard it was I would pull down a copy of K&R to have them show me the hard parts.

As to Redis, it's likely there are not many books out there in print. For example https://rdg.ent.sirsidynix.net.uk/client/en_GB/library/search/results?q=redis&ln=en_GB&lm=EXCL_LR2&submit=Search+Enterprise found mainly if not all were electronic resources. Note the dates of 2014 and 2018.

Parting shot of my now downsized collection:

[estherschindler]

I find it REALLY difficult to cull the herd.

Which is okay, because being a pack rat led me to write this story, several years ago. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2826737/programmers-who-defined-the-technology-industry--where-are-they-now-.html

[Vandiun]

Developers with previous database knowledge will benefit greatly from learning Redis. The book is intended for developers who are unfamiliar with Redis or memory storage caching. It does, however, rely on traditional relational database models to describe some of Redis' common properties. Also, you can check these E-books mentioned here. I think they're very helpful.

[Vandiun]

Developers with previous database knowledge will benefit greatly from learning Redis. The book is intended for developers who are unfamiliar with Redis or memory storage caching. It does, however, rely on traditional relational database models to describe some of Redis' common properties. Also, you can check these E-books mentioned in this link. I think they're very helpful.
https://redis.com/ebooks/