Learning Serverless

by Jason Katzer

Genres: Technology

230 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2020

Reviews

[Sebastian Gebski]

I literally have no clue how to rate this book.

Honestly, it's a book about 'serverless' that barely touches the specifics of the serverless architectures at all. I've expected to 'up my game' with some practical lessons learned about how the serverless approach stands out and I didn't get almost anything virtually close to that.

OK, but the book is not 20 pages long, so what's in it? Mainly more generic stuff regarding different aspects of modern architectures, e.g.: what are microservices, how to (technically) solve challenges of coupling, the characteristics of good monitoring & observability, etc. The only chapters which are truly about serverless-specific stuff are 3 and 5. Anything else worse mentioning? Yes. The author tries to keep the book cloud-provider agnostic. AWS is mentioned more than other providers, but the examples (not many of them in general ...) are prepared using The Serverless Framework (https://www.serverless.com/) which is definitely not a bad idea.

To summarize: the book is OK if you want to learn a bit about modern architectures AND how does the serverless fit (without focusing on any particular cloud). BUT there are better general architecture-related books and DEFINITELY there are also better books about serverless in particular. If I could get back in time, I wouldn't reach for this book.

[Jakub Janeczko · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is misleading. There are a few chapters about serverless and it touches the topic in other, but mainly there is much more content summarizing (or introducing, depends on a reader experience) good practices in software development. Reaching for that kind of a book I expect it to explain me the topic and to deep dive into it, but now I have to look for sth else.
I would recommend it for people who just begin their journey in the IT.

[Allisonperkel · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an overview of serverless and how to think about building out your system this book is a wonderful overview with a lot of wisdom on the pitfalls present. As someone who loves distributed systems and has a lot of scars that the author specifically calls out I felt a lot of nostalgia as I read through the book.

If you are looking for a truly deep dive into the nuts and bolts of serverless this book is not for you. It mostly stays above the details and instead acts as a map that can lead you to other areas for deeper learning.

Which leads me to who is this book for. There are a lot of ways you can take this book - if you are a manager it can help you orient yourself to some of the pitfalls your teams will hit. As a developer it can function as a map to what topics you'll need to dive deeper into. This book is not going to teach you how to write great lambdas but it will help you learn how to think about putting the system together.

[Marcin Jałbrzykowski · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am really disappointed with this book. Of course, it contains a lot of interesting insights about SDLC and even career management but serverless aspects are barely touched at all. I haven't learned much about serverless after the lecture of this book. I think that the author should focus more on serverless than the other topics described in this publication.

[Karim Butt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not really about serverless specifically (maybe 5% of it is specific to serverless) but a decent refresher of all-around architectural best practices.