Who Should Read This Book?

If you develop applications that have some kind of server/backend for storing or processing data, and your applications use the internet (e.g., web applications, mobile apps, or internet-connected sensors), then this book is for you.

This book is for software engineers, software architects, and technical managers who love to code. It is especially relevant if you need to make decisions about the architecture of the systems you work on—for example, if you need to choose tools for solving a given problem and figure out how best to apply them. But even if you have no choice over your tools, this book will help you better understand their strengths and weaknesses.

You should have some experience building web-based applications or network services, and you should be familiar with relational databases and SQL. Any non-relational databases and other data-related tools you know are nice, but not required.

A general understanding of common network protocols like TCP and HTTP is helpful. Your choice of programming language or framework makes no difference for this book.