Books

STOP building fragile AI wrappers. START designing resilient AI systems. Lots of companies are trying to make their small AI experiments into big products, but they don't have a good plan. Engineers need a practical guide to build these new AI systems the right way - so they can handle scale, be reliable, and won't cost too much. This book is that guide. It explains how to design systems that use AI models. This book breaks down the architecture of real AI applications, like an AI-powered code editor or a smart learning app. It gives you a deep, practical look at the real-world challenges and solutions for building these systems. It discusses system design concepts for systems that use LLMs.

Metagraphs for Agentic AI: Beyond Triples, Beyond HypergraphsFrom Knowledge Graphs to Knowledge ArchitecturesThe triple is not enough.Every AI engineer building agent memory hits the same wall. You model a meeting as a knowledge graph triple — and immediately lose the fact that five people were in the room, a decision was made, and that decision caused three downstream actions. You reify. You flatten. You create workarounds. And your "knowledge graph" becomes a tangle of auxiliary nodes that machines can traverse but no human can reason about.This book shows you the way out. What You'll Learn Metagraphs are graph structures where edges connect sets of nodes to sets of nodes — and where edges themselves can be referenced as first-class nodes. They are the missing data structure for AI agents that need to remember, reason, and coordinate like humans do.This book takes you on a complete journey:Hypergraphs first. You'll learn what they are, why they matter, and where they break down. You'll implement them three ways — in SQL, in LadybugDB (Cypher), and in TypeDB — so you understand the tradeoffs viscerally, not just theoretically.Then metagraphs. You'll see how metagraphs solve the fundamental hypergraph problem (edges that can't be nodes), explore RDF named graphs as a lightweight metagraph, and implement full metagraphs in the same three database paradigms with production-ready, commented code.Then the big ideas. Semantic Spacetime. Holonic systems. Human cognitive architecture mapped to graph structures. Multi-agent coordination. Promise Theory for autonomous AI networks. This is where metagraphs stop being a data structure and become an architecture for intelligence. Who This Book Is For You're a software engineer, AI researcher, or knowledge graph practitioner who builds real systems. You've used Neo4j or RDF stores. You've built RAG pipelines. You've felt the limits. You want to know what comes next.No PhD required. Every concept comes with working code in SQL, Cypher, TypeQL, SPARQL, and Python. What Makes This Book Different This isn't a theoretical monograph. It's the distillation of two and a half years of research, 130+ published articles, and hands-on implementation at the intersection of knowledge graphs and agentic AI.Every chapter bridges theory and practice. You'll read about Basu and Blanning's formal metagraph definition — and then build the schema in PostgreSQL. You'll learn Mark Burgess's Promise Theory — and then model a multi-agent coordination protocol as a six-layer promise graph. You'll understand why labeled property graphs are secretly metagraphs — and what that means for your Neo4j deployment today. 18 Chapters. Three Parts. One Argument. Part I — The Hypergraph Foundation (7 chapters): From the knowledge representation crisis through hypergraph theory to three complete database implementations.Part II — The Metagraph Solution (5 chapters): Metagraphs as the answer, RDF named graphs as a bridge, and three full metagraph implementations with detailed commentary.Part III — Theory Meets Practice (6 chapters): Semantic Spacetime, labeled property graphs, AI memory and human cognition, holonic systems, agent-to-agent interaction, and Promise Graphs for network-of-networks coordination. The Core Thesis If you want AI agents that reason like humans, you need knowledge structures that capture how humans actually organize knowledge — not as flat collections of facts, but as nested, hierarchical, context-rich, temporally-aware structures where relationships themselves carry meaning and can be the subject of further reasoning.Metagraphs are that structure. This book shows you why, and how to build with them.

Built for the curious, this isn’t your average programming book—it’s nearly 500 pages of hands-on mentorship beyond coding, fusing core skills in Elixir, Ecto, and SQLite with business experience and R&D tenacity. Think of it as a $500 course distilled into one powerhouse resource, with tons of learning-by-doing, in a single project. Acquire hard skills in Elixir and database modeling with Ecto's migrations, changesets, and more, re-imagining a classic database that millions around the world have used before for learning. By fearlessly ditching the "happy path", this immersive, exploratory, memorable, project-based tutorial helps you confidently tackle real-world projects with Elixir and Ecto.

What really happens when PostgreSQL executes your query? Follow a SQL statement through every stage of PostgreSQL's internal pipeline—from raw text to returned results—and gain the deep understanding that transforms how you write, tune, and debug database applications.

Build a working SQL database engine in C++20 -- from raw pages to a realquery executor -- one compilable, measured challenge at a time. Everyperformance claim is a benchmark you run yourself; every unit ends with areal bug, caught red-handed and fixed. Nothing asserted. Everythingdemonstrated.

This series of test-driven small coding puzzles lets you code a database from scratch (no dependencies).We'll cover KV storage engines, LSM-Tree indexes, SQL, concurrent transactions, ACID, etc.

DuckDB has changed how people work with data by bringing fast analytical queries to a lightweight embedded database. Whether you are exploring Parquet files, building data pipelines or embedding analytics into your application, this handbook shows you how to get the most out of DuckDB with practical examples and real-world techniques.

Slow SQL queries waste time, increase costs, and limit scalability. Mastering SQL Performance Optimization teaches you how to analyze execution plans, optimize queries and indexes, and solve real-world performance bottlenecks across today's leading database platforms.

Master distributed systems through visual diagrams — from clock drift and CAP to Paxos, Raft, and distributed transactions, explained with clear illustrations instead of dense academic papers.

Learn databases from the bottom up by coding your own, in small steps, and with simple Go code (language agnostic).Atomicity & durability. A DB is more than files!Persist data with fsync.Crash recovery.KV store based on B-tree.Disk-based data structures.Space management with a free list.Relational DB on top of KV.Learn how tables and indexes are related to B-trees.SQL-like query language; parser & interpreter.Concurrent transactions with copy-on-write data structures.

Build real-world software by coding a Redis server from scratch.Network programming. The next level of programming is programming for multiple machines. Think HTTP servers, RPCs, databases, distributed systems.Data structures. Redis is the best example of applying data structures to real-world problems. Why stop at theoretical, textbook-level knowledge when you can learn from production software?Low-level C. C was, is, and will be widely used for systems programming and infrastructure software. It’s a gateway to many low-level projects.From scratch. A quote from Richard Feynman: “What I cannot create, I do not understand”. You should test your learning with real-world projects!

Most developers treat Hibernate as a black box that turns objects into rows. This book opens the box, shows you exactly what happens inside, and teaches you how to make it work for you at scale.

"It’s 3 AM, your database just hit 500 connections, and everything has ground to a halt. Do you know why?"Most database outages aren't mysterious—they are architectural. Stop treating PostgreSQL as a black box and start understanding the mechanical "why" behind the engine. PostgreSQL Internals Mastery: Volume I is a modular deep dive designed for senior engineers who need to bridge the gap between writing SQL and architecting high-performance systems. From the process-per-connection model to the groundbreaking Asynchronous I/O (AIO) features of PostgreSQL 18, learn the internals that separate database architects from administrators. Don't just tune knobs; understand the machine.

This book provides an introduction to the high-level concepts behind query engines and walks through all aspects of building a fully working SQL query engine in Kotlin.

Master PostgreSQL administration with a practical guide to deploying, securing, optimizing, and operating production databases. Covering PostgreSQL 17 and 18, this book combines real-world examples, hands-on labs, and proven best practices for reliable, high-performance systems.