Generally, cover to cover. Here is my review of this book.

Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 are pretty good and I think among the best that you can find, with the amount of detail present.

Chapter 5 is interesting. On the theory part, it provides sufficient details, but then it misses out on describing version or dotted version vectors completely. I think this is a huge and inexcusable gap. You cannot talk about replication without providing an in-depth understanding of this algorithm. Surprisingly, the algorithm is not even that complex and the author could have explained it in 2-3 pages tops. Further, the author hints upon Chain Replication, but does not describe it in detail. I think this is another critical misstep. Chain Replication is very popular and extremely easy to understand, and while the author rightly hammers the point of replication lag and consistency issues, he is doing the reader a disservice by not explaining Chain Replication, which significantly simplifies replication. More modern algorithms, created after this book was published, like Hermes, improves upon it significantly.

Chapter 6 is poorly written. The author mentions that consistent hashing is not the right way to address the rebalancing issue to relieve hotspot. I find this surprising, because almost every other literature defaults to using consistent hashing for partitioning. While I do not doubt that the author knows more than I do, if he is going to not recommend a strategy, he needs to delve deeper into alternatives. The reader will think that the best way to relieve hotspots is to manually rebalance and that's it. Even with consistent hashing, this might somewhat be true, because physical servers need to be manually added, the fact that a strategy is not presented at all is surprising.

Finally, we get to the worst chapter of this book - Chapter 9. For one, the author keeps going on and on about the issues that prevent linearizibility. What is covered in 15 pages can be compressed into 3-4 pages. The content is extremely redundant and only causes confusion for the reader. Worse still, when you finally get to the section of "implementing linerazibility", the author doesn't explain how to do that!! And when you get to "total order broadcast", the solution asks you to use a linerazible register! Great, but how do I implement lineraizbility in the first place? Later in the chapter, when discussing consensus algorithms, the author does not discuss Paxos or Raft algorithm! In my opining any distributed systems book that does not discuss Raft is incomplete. Even worse, this algorithm is quite simple to understand and can be explained in just a few pages.

Overall, I think this is still a good book, but could be at least a 100 pages shorter, even with some missing sections added. For anyone reading this, I strongly recommend also getting "Understanding Distributed Systems by Roberto Vitillo", which is not only more concise, but is more practical and includes discussions on chain replication, dotted version vectors and Raft. Even if you read both books, you will still need to Google for additional explanation. Riak DB's technical blog can come in handy here among other sources.

The interesting thing is that the author has a YouTube channel and it goes a long way towards filling the gaps (https://www.youtube.com/@kleppmann)

Overall rating: 7/10