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pdhborgestoday at 4:11 PM2 repliesview on HN

This review is not so nice: https://emptysqua.re/blog/review-queue-theory-book/


Replies

kqrtoday at 5:31 PM

I'm not sure how you came away with that impression. Three out of three reviewers say they overall enjoyed the book. The complaints fall mostly into four buckets:

- "I wish the book was simpler" (Jesse)

- "I wish the book was more advanced" (Murat)

- "I wish software engineering was more advanced" (Andrew)

- "I didn't understand the arguments the author made for why studying single-server exponential response time systems helps with drawing conclusions for time-sharing, heavy-tailed response time systems" (Jesse)

None of these paint the book in a bad colour, as far as I can tell. They say more about the reader's expectations than the book itself.

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jstimpfletoday at 8:03 PM

This book is one of the few books I own and I couldn't agree more with these reviews. I read maybe 20 to 50 pages of it, and didn't and up with a lot of practically relevant insights. I couldn't say it's a bad book, maybe it's even a good one.

But theory about computer science is always waaaay to removed from practical reality. Only a tiny bit of basic theory is applicable in reality, and from then on, in practice we're just busy fighting with practical problems, we're hardly getting to the theoretic ones.