Great work explaining the networking OSI model.Probably best material i have read in all my technical years (including**spoiler alert** Stuff i liked:
Great work explaining the networking OSI model.Probably best material i have read in all my technical years (including the dedicated course in university). The physical, link layer , NAT, NIC , headers all explained so nice with a lot of examples and pictures.
Great at explaining state machines , the lower level of networking in a game , Berkeley sockets , streams, checksums, retry packet strategies bandwidth etc...
Great work on expalining how to reduce traffic by using entropy prediction for the state of the game !
Superb work at explaining strategies to mitigate latency, jitter using interpolation, extrapolation and many other techniques.
Really appreciated that the book included a section on what it means for a game to have intrgrated game services (for example Steam) , anticheat strategies and moving to cloud
The stuff i didn't grok:
Though the book was deep in many aspects it jumped ahead and raced exactly when having to explain how does one manage partitioned world state in a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, how do you provide fallbacks and how do you distribute players across geograhpyically distributed servers.
I get that game programming is done mostly in C++ but i found it many times cumbersome to read the code samples with the pointers and all that stuff. I think pseudocode or any other high level language would have worked, or even more diagrams. Its ok to read a class containing 1-3 mrthods , but when the sample is pages long C++ will be in your way (if you are not a cpp dev)
Some sections included too much code and a too deep dive where i think it wasn't necessary.
I would say this book is great for starters into Networked Games, but beyond that when you have some experience i would use carefully selected chapters of this book as refrences.
**spoiler alert** While the book started really strong and interesting explaining historical modelling , around the 30% mark it gets nasty , confusing**spoiler alert** While the book started really strong and interesting explaining historical modelling , around the 30% mark it gets nasty , confusing and you don't really understand how the pieces fit together.
The author while most certainly knows alot of &$it about distributed systems and immutable architecture , he certainly didn't give much thought on how to put it all together and create some damn coherence for the reader.
Ex: we are discussing historical modelling on the first 5 chapters , then out of friggin nowhere i'm cramped in a chapter about security - assymetric keys/hashes. Down the road another chapter is.about sql databases. The chapters are tackled somehow relating to immutable architecture but there is no damn structure , no order and definetly no logic as to why they were pushed there and in that order , its more like reading a memo.
**spoiler alert** This book can be easily considered one of the pillars of optimization.
It is really incredible how the author begins the journey from**spoiler alert** This book can be easily considered one of the pillars of optimization.
It is really incredible how the author begins the journey from the lowest OSI layer to the browser and the newest trends in realtime communication.
The book starts with detailing each different medium (fiber, satellite , radio , wifi) we can nowadays use in order to send packets over the network.Interestingly enough he gets you into data transmission , signal processing , electronics and physics in order to give you an idea on how each medium impacts your app's performance and their hidden latencies.
The book then shifts to TCP and UDP, TLS, TURN , ICE and STUN protocols.Awesome chapter , i would have never known the intricacies of TCP and its adaptability regarding the unreliability of the underlying network.(The congestion window mechanisms part was insane).
Another chapter is dedicated to wireless networks.
The most interesting part was the one regarding mobile networks. The author does a terrific job by first explaining how your handset works , how it efficiently uses its battery in order to accomodate the ever consuming radio(s) (2G,3G,4G) , its complicated RRC (radio resource controller) protocol that manages the exchanges with the radio tower and handles your phone state-machine that manages your battery and its sensible connection with its radio.
Then he goes overdrive detailing LTE radio networks , with their architecture and components (RAN, ETC-SGW,PGW,MME) , the way they manage to serve users that are in constant motion (MME) switching them from radio tower to radio tower , updating their position in realtime and performing billing and security checks ; the way they direct packets from the public internet to their gateways ,parse , corect them , resolve users , find corresponding tower and negotiate protocols with the user handset to in the end forward the message. Its really interesting that the principles of clustering and load balacing that apply nowadays to any web application component (database, api , web app) were present in the telecom domain for a very long time and more importantly , not only for software but for radio towers as well.
The book then moves to HTTP , HTTPS , XHR(interesting history part here ) , SSE , Websockets and last but not least WebRTC.
Even though the last part was detailed and interesting i found it nowhere close to the one regarding mobile networks( could be due to the fact that i was already familiar with the concepts)
Awesome read and i recommend it wholeheartedly for anyone interested in building high performance applications.It is one of those reads which takes a hollistic view on all the layers and components involved to give you a neat idea on how to build something !...more
Having googlers reason about their giant architecture, the difficulties it imposed and then explain on how they handled them is invaluable for any IT Having googlers reason about their giant architecture, the difficulties it imposed and then explain on how they handled them is invaluable for any IT engineer.
While reading it , it might (hopefully) occur to you that there's a whole new world out there , at a total different scale with problems that need solving that you could not even imagine ( Multi Paxos , Resource Planning , Borg , Big Table etc...)
I see this book as a creativity additive before all else....more
Definetly a must read for anyone interested in designing fault tolerant large scale systems.This book covers most hot topics and problems encountered Definetly a must read for anyone interested in designing fault tolerant large scale systems.This book covers most hot topics and problems encountered by organizations when trying to scale , operate and extend their infrastructure. The style of writing is entertaining and still the author is does not shy from tackling hard problems like consensus algorhytms, database engines , synchronization in distributed systems, CAP , efficient indexing ..etc...more
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