I'm currently writing a book for PragProg called Building Distributed Services with Go (though it mostly applies to other languages too) that's walks you through building a distributed database from scratch. You can sign up on this mailing list to know when it's available: https://travisjeffery.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1e3ff7...

This one, it covers all the aspects deeper. The next book, if you want to go deeper, can be an upcoming 4th edition of Principles of Distributed Database Systems https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030262525

There's nothing stopping you from just writing code following the lectures. What else would a practical/lab part be? \

There are tons of open-source databases on github that you can hack on so I don't think there's a major issue with getting practical experience if you want it.

You can try the homework assignments. They aren't trivial and you'll probably learn a bunch more by not being spoon fed the answers. Admittedly, the only bummer is not having someone review your work.

I don't know if I'm seeing the old version or the new version, but this is still very hard to read.

Advice to all web designers: Please do not use "font-weight: 300" for body text, ever. Simply changing that to 400 in the developer tools made it much more readable. The font was still bugging me, so I tried killing the "font-family: futura pt" too.

Wow! What a world of difference. Now it is super easy to read, instead of looking like it's trying to show off some design style.

Know your audience: you are addressing potential database developers with this book, not graphic designers.

I completely agree that it always depends on the goal. I'd also add a second vector: experience. If you've already worked with distributed and/or storage systems and have understanding of the field, you can jump straight to papers and code. However, for people who are just starting, it may be beneficial to read an overview book and get familiar with a field. This book attempts to be that a starting point that can help to navigate database papers and code.

Some of the folks I talked to who have already worked with databases a lot mentioned they've benefited from the book as well, since there were some concepts they were less familiar with or never had to learn (for example, transactional processing for the folks who have mostly worked with on eventually consistent databases; or B-Tree details for the folks who have mostly worked on LSM-Based storage engine)

Disclaimer: I'm author of this book.

Ostensibly. Some may want the paper and an actual learning experience that isn't virtualised. I must be asking for too much.

I also might not understand the purpose of the video lectures. If they supplant face to face time but get rid of the tedium, then I would say it should also accompany course/lecture notes, reading texts, and/or supplemental documents.

I just think forcing people to watch youtube videos is a much lower quality experience for a student. If it's a required course I'd want a refund for being forced into a lazy teaching format.