Books I've been reading

A quick list of books I’ve been reading while at Recurse Center:

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications - A dense read on the gnarly details of large, distributed data systems, and the tradeoffs of design choices therein, but very worth it. Several people in my DDIA reading group have read it before, and seem to be getting more out of it on their second or third read, so I assume I’ll do the same.
• SQL for Data Analysis - I picked this up to become better at data analysis, since my background is in data engineering and I had good, but not excellent SQL skills, and it’s really helped me fill in some major gaps. I do wish there were more sample data available for the first two chapters – there’s some in a GitHub repo, but not for all of the examples, and in order to really understand some of the SQL, I had to mock up tables myself.
• Learning SQL - Another book I picked up to fill in my SQL gaps. I got about halfway through before starting RC, put it down to focus on my first project, and want to pick it up again after working through a fair bit of SQL for Data Analysis. This one has better sample data than SQL for Data Analysis – there are exercises at the end of each chapter that use the Sakila sample DB.
• Fluent Python - I just started reading this and it’s amazing. I highly recommend it to anyone who has a solid Python background and wants to understand the language more deeply and write better code. (I think this book would be a little difficult for total beginners, however.) I basically skipped straight to the section on with blocks to understand the psyocpg2 and sqlite3 context managers better, then started over from the beginning. Looking forward to making this my summer beach read. 🌴