Created at: 2024-10-20
In progress - I will annotate this more as a go through the book.
This review is based on someone that already has experience with Linux and has done performance analysis of programs before. Take this into consideration when reading the below. If you are on the same boat, this review might help you as guided reading.
Chapter 1 is very introductory. If you have ~5 years of experience or more, chances are you are familiar with a lot of the content and you can skip the chapter in its entirety. However, check the "Linux Perf Analysis in 60 Seconds" section, it's worth it.
Chapter 2 is still very basic. I'd recommend reading the Concepts and Methodologies section, and skimming through the Modelling section so that you are familiar to the concepts as they are used in further chapters. The explanations are not super thorough, so you might want to do background research when you feel like you need more information in future chapters, but do not stop here.
Chapter 3 is a basic introduction to Operating Systems. It is still very surface level. It may provide more questions than answers, and it goes very fast. Have a look at the "Background" section for terms you are not familiar with and read them, but skip the others. Read the "Linux" section, skip the rest.
The remaining of the book follows a similar trend of the chapters described above. Most of the content is high-level but not detailed enough. You may feel like you don't really hold a grasp on the subjects after reading.
That is not a bad thing necessarily. The book is already gigantic, trying to cover everything in depth would end up on a multi-volume encyclopedia.
Fortunately, most of the gaps can be filled by Google searches and Wikipedia lookups.
At the moment I have only focused on perf and CPU performance. I would like
to think/learn about disk I/O next.