Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, (Revised) Third Edition: Distributed Data at Web Scale

A pretty mediocre book, especially so for being the 3rd edition. Far from a definitive guide, it's more like a basic introduction. The book is also poorly organized, with important architectural info hidden away inside peripheral chapters. So you have to read through the whole book rather than focus on the chapters that interest you. The architecture chapter is the best and most important in my view, and I wish this chapter had 2x or even 3x the content, and consolidated the architectural info scattered across other chapters.Given how complex the data modeling is, and the many restrictions Cassandra imposes, much more effort should have been devoted to this. This info in this book is again very basic, and again scattered throughout the book. A better organization would have divided the book into multiple sections, with the first section dedicated to understanding Cassandra, a second section dedicated to data modeling and system design, and a third section dedicated to all the operational stuff.Still, the book is a worthwhile read to understand the basics (and many limitations) of Cassandra as a data store, and can be a quick read, just be careful when skipping stuff, as there are deeply buried nuggets everywhere.

I have been using Cassandra for some time and had reach the point that scaling and really became relevant. I bought the book to understand better how Cassandra works and how to do maintenance for it. I found the book really helpful. For everything I already knew there I learned something new.The only part I found a bit short was how to run Cassandra in Kubernetes. How to add or remove a node, how to enlarge or shrink the PVC, those operations are quite different from a normal cluster and I did not find this in the book. But other than this, I liked it very much!

o'reilly publishing sucks. I wish authors self-published. I would buy that instead.