Monster Scale Summit speakers have amassed a rather impressive list of publications, including quite a few books If you’ve seen the Monster Scale Summit agenda, you know that the stars have aligned nicely. In just two half days, from anywhere you like, you can learn from 60+ outstanding speakers exploring extreme scale engineering challenges from a variety of angles (distributed databases, real-time data, AI, Rust…) If you read the bios of our speakers, you’ll note that many have written books. This blog highlights 11 Monster Scale reads. 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 Monster SCALE community a nice 45% discount on all Manning books. Conference attendees who participate in the speaker chat will be eligible to win print books (courtesy of O’Reilly) and eBook bundles (courtesy of Manning). March 4 update: There’s also a special Manning offer (50% off!) for Monster Scale bundles. See the agenda and register – it’s free Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders By Camille Fournier and Ian Nowland October 2024 Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly Until recently, infrastructure was the backbone of organizations operating software they developed in-house. But now that cloud vendors run the computers, companies can finally bring the benefits of agile custom-centricity to their own developers. Adding product management to infrastructure organizations is now all the rage. But how’s that possible when infrastructure is still the operational layer of the company? This practical book guides engineers, managers, product managers, and leaders through the shifts required to become a modern platform-led organization. You’ll learn what platform engineering is “and isn’t” and what benefits and value it brings to developers and teams. You’ll understand what it means to approach your platform as a product and learn some of the most common technical and managerial barriers to success. With this book, you’ll: Cultivate a platform-as-product, developer-centric mindset Learn what platform engineering teams are and are not Start the process of adopting platform engineering within your organization Discover what it takes to become a product manager for a platform team Understand the challenges that emerge when you scale platforms Automate processes and self-service infrastructure to speed development and improve developer experience Build out, hire, manage, and advocate for a platform team Camille is presenting “What Engineering Leaders Get Wrong About Scale”   Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition By Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly February 2026 Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability need to be resolved. In addition, there’s an overwhelming variety of tools and analytical systems, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, plus data warehouses and data lakes. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords? In this second edition, authors Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini build on the foundation laid in the acclaimed first edition, integrating new technologies and emerging trends. You’ll be guided through the maze of decisions and trade-offs involved in building a modern data system, from choosing the right tools like Spark and Flink to understanding the intricacies of data laws like the GDPR. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn to use them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures Martin and Chris are featured in “Fireside Chat: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Second Edition”   The Coder Cafe: 66 Timeless Concepts for Software Engineers By Teiva Harsanyi ETA Summer 2026 Manning (use code SCALE2026 for 45%) Great software developers—even the proverbial greybeards—get a little better every day by adding knowledge and skills continuously. This new book invites you to share a cup of coffee with senior Google engineer Teiva Harsanyi as he shows you how to make your code more readable, use unit tests as documentation, reduce latency, navigate complex systems, and more. The Coder Cafe introduces 66 vital software engineering concepts that will upgrade your day-to-day practice, regardless of your skill level. You’ll find focused explanations—each five pages or less—on everything from foundational data structures to distributed architecture. These timeless concepts are the perfect way to turn your coffee break into a high-impact career boost. Generate property-based tests to expose hidden edge cases automatically Explore the CAP and PACELC theorems to balance consistency and availability trade-offs Design graceful-degradation strategies to keep systems usable under failure Leverage Bloom filters to perform fast, memory-efficient membership checks Cultivate lateral thinking to uncover unconventional solutions Teiva is presenting “Working on Complex Systems”   Think Distributed Systems By Dominik Tornow August 2025 Bookshop.org | Amazon | Manning (use code SCALE2026 for 45%) 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 clearly-written 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 “Systems Engineering for Agentic Applications,” which is the topic of his upcoming book   Database Performance at Scale By Felipe Cardeneti Mendes, Piotr Sarna, Pavel Emelyanov, and Cynthia Dunlop September 2023 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 “The Engineering Behind ScyllaDB’s Efficiency” and will be hosting the ScyllaDB Lounge   Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read By Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop December 2025 Bookshop.org | Amazon | Manning (use code SCALE2026 for 45%) Think about 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 This book features the work of numerous Monster Scale Summit speakers, including Joran Greef and Sanchay Javeria. There’s also a reference to Pat Helland in Bryan Cantrill’s foreword.   ScyllaDB in Action Bo Ingram October 2024 Bookshop.org | Amazon | Manning  (use code SCALE2026 for 45%) | ScyllaDB (free chapters) 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’s colleagues Ethan Donowitz and Peter French are presenting “How Discord Automates Database Operations at Scale”   Latency: Reduce Delay in Software Systems By Pekka Enberg Bookshop.org | Amazon | Manning (use code SCALE2026 for 45%) 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 and his Turso teammates are frequent speakers at Monster Scale Summit’s sister conference, P99 CONF   100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them By Teiva Harsanyi August 2022 Bookshop.org | Amazon | Manning (use code SCALE2026 for 45%) 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them puts a spotlight on common errors in Go code you might not even know you’re making. You’ll explore key areas of the language such as concurrency, testing, data structures, and more—and learn how to avoid and fix mistakes in your own projects. As you go, you’ll navigate the tricky bits of handling JSON data and HTTP services, discover best practices for Go code organization, and learn how to use slices efficiently. This book shows you how to: Dodge the most common mistakes made by Go developers Structure and organize your Go application Handle data and control structures efficiently Deal with errors in an idiomatic manner Improve your concurrency skills Optimize your code Make your application production-ready and improve testing quality Teiva is presenting “Working on Complex Systems”   The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change By Camille Fournier May 2017 Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal—especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager. From mentoring interns to working with senior staff, you’ll get actionable advice for approaching various obstacles in your path. This book is ideal whether you’re a new manager, a mentor, or a more experienced leader looking for fresh advice. Pick up this book and learn how to become a better manager and leader in your organization. Begin by exploring what you expect from a manager Understand what it takes to be a good mentor, and a good tech lead Learn how to manage individual members while remaining focused on the entire team Understand how to manage yourself and avoid common pitfalls that challenge many leaders Manage multiple teams and learn how to manage managers Learn how to build and bootstrap a unifying culture in teams Camille is presenting “What Engineering Leaders Get Wrong About Scale”   The Missing README: A Guide for the New Software Engineer By Chris Riccomini and Dmitriy Ryaboy Bookshop.org | Amazon | O’Reilly August 2021 For new software engineers, knowing how to program is only half the battle. You’ll quickly find that many of the skills and processes key to your success are not taught in any school or bootcamp. The Missing README fills in that gap—a distillation of workplace lessons, best practices, and engineering fundamentals that the authors have taught rookie developers at top companies for more than a decade. Early chapters explain what to expect when you begin your career at a company. The book’s middle section expands your technical education, teaching you how to work with existing codebases, address and prevent technical debt, write production-grade software, manage dependencies, test effectively, do code reviews, safely deploy software, design evolvable architectures, and handle incidents when you’re on-call. Additional chapters cover planning and interpersonal skills such as Agile planning, working effectively with your manager, and growing to senior levels and beyond. You’ll learn: How to use the legacy code change algorithm, and leave code cleaner than you found it How to write operable code with logging, metrics, configuration, and defensive programming How to write deterministic tests, submit code reviews, and give feedback on other people’s code The technical design process, including experiments, problem definition, documentation, and collaboration What to do when you are on-call, and how to navigate production incidents Architectural techniques that make code change easier Agile development practices like sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives Chris is featured in “Fireside Chat: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Second Edition” (with Martin Kleppmann)