See it on Amazon.

I’ve just read I Heart Logs by Jay Kreps. Guess what ? This book is not about Logs !

What’s inside?

When I’ve picked this book, I was eager to learn how to handle all the technical and logging logs I have in my apps. I was quite disappointed, but I kept reading.

This book could have been tilted “I Heart Messages”. I have a quite interesting experience in distributed architectures based on events, messages and “services bus” (from Biztalk, to Azure, to Syslog-based architectures). When I think “logs”, I think about unstructured, text data. The author, and this book, talks about highly structured messages as “logs”. It explores how you can use “logs” as the foundation of your architecture and your data flow between components. From this point of view, it’s an interesting introduction (this book is less than 100-pages). The reading is quite easy and does not requires extensive technical knowledge.

Bottom line

If, for you, “log” equals debug, technical log, syslog and so on, this book is not for you. If you ask yourself questions about data in your company, this book can give a new vision on how to handle it. But if you are familiar with concepts like Enterprise Service Bus, you may not learn so much…

Disclosure: O’Reilly send me a free copy of this ebook in exchange for this review.