Redis in Action

Many Redis books only teach commands; this one teaches how to use them. The author, Josiah L. Carlson, has long been active on the Redis mailing list and in the open-source community, and nearly every concept in the book lands on a real project you can run: from small features like article voting, shopping carts, and web page caching, all the way up to distributed locks, semaphores, task queues, ad targeting, and a social network, and finally memory compression, sharded scaling, and Lua scripting. This build-it-first, then-optimize, then-scale approach lets readers see the reasoning behind engineering decisions rather than a scattered list of APIs. The translator, Huang Jianhong, is himself the author of Redis Design and Implementation and a well-known Redis advocate in China; his terminology is accurate, his annotations are thoughtful, and the Chinese sample code is organized on a companion site, so it does not read like a translation. The 11 chapters in three parts are clearly structured: on a first pass you can follow only the cases in Parts One and Two, and turn to Part Three when you hit performance problems, making it well suited as a book to keep at hand for reference. One caveat: the book was written against Redis 2, and Redis has since moved to 7.x, so newer features such as Cluster and Stream are not covered. But the fundamentals—the five data structures, persistence and replication, distributed locks and queues—have barely changed, and the book's thinking still holds today. It is best treated as a conceptual textbook for understanding what Redis can do and how it should be done, supplemented with the official documentation for version updates, for the most efficient learning.