CS Books I'll be reading in 2026.
Hi, 2025 has come to an end. It was a wonderful year for me, and I hope it was for you too. I worked with different tech stacks, including Golang, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, MySQL, Cassandra, ClickHouse, Kafka and encryption algorithms.
But one thing that bothers me is “we work with computers on a high level” and we really don’t know how a computer works, how memory works and all that stuff. That’s why I also started learning some foundational computer science topics in the last 2 months.
I’ve a deep interest in learning how computers work; that’s why in my 2026 books collection I’ve added books that cover computer science, not any particular language or technology.
1. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
I’m a backend engineer by profession; hence, it became very important for me to understand operating systems. But in my opinion every software engineer needs to know about OS in depth. Because OS is the core layer on which your programs run. If you know about OS, you can build efficient and reliable software.
2. Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective
This book does not teach “How to code?” Instead it will teach “How computer system works from a programmer point of view. It explains how C code maps to machine code, memory, and the processor. It teaches about about performance, caching, virtual memory, and concurrency. This book is good for those who want to learn about computer at low level.
3. Distributed Systems — Maarten Van Steen
For a backend engineer, distributed systems are a must-know concept. In simple terms, a distributed system is a collection of computers that are connected over a network to achieve a common goal. Microservices architecture is an example of a distributed system. If you think about backend engineering beyond APIs, you will see a world of distributed systems.
4. Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Nowadays, a million queries per second is a normal thing for large-scale software. At this scale, building a system that handles data is difficult. This book teaches how to design reliable, scalable, and maintainable data systems. It explains core concepts like storage engines, replication, partitioning, and consistency. We can learn the trade-offs behind databases, queues, streams, and distributed systems.
5. Database Internals
In my opinion, if you need to work effectively with any technology, you need to know how this technology is built under the hood. We work with databases every day without knowing how our queries are processed. This book teaches how databases are built under the hood. It explains storage engines, indexes, B-trees, LSM trees, and write-ahead logging. We learn about concurrency control, transactions, and recovery mechanisms.
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Bye Bye 2025
These were my picks for 2026. If you have also planned some books for next year I would love to know them in comment section. Thank You
Hello there Sushant, I’ve been a quiet observer of your posts, always interesting, thank you.
Happy new year!
I thought you may enjoy this article:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jordannuttall/p/laws-of-thought-before-ai?r=4f55i2&utm_medium=ios
Your curiosity is admirable and would serve you well in your career but reading books will only take you so far. I was in your situation, and all the books you mentioned I have read completely or partially and it certainly helps but not as much as you think. I even have hardcopies of some of them.
These are all books related to Systems. When it comes to that, nothing actually beats doing Systems and actually writing code. Systems is a programming heavy field (with minimal math), instead of reading all these books I recommend you do the following,
1. Do the MIT 6.828, Operating Systems Engineering course. That will teach you more about Operating systems than any book although OSTEP is brilliant. I have a hard copy which I continuously refer. Nothing beats stepping through the code with a debugger, inspecting stack traces. Do you want to read about how stack unwinding works or do you actually want to implement it in an OS ? Do you only want to read about virtual memory or actually implement a multi-level page table in C ? Do you want to read about context switches or actually step through one , as in step through assembly code involved in context switching?
2. Do the CMU 15-445 Database Systems Engineering course. I am working on it right now. That will teach you about DBMSs than any book, paper etc. Do you only want to read about B+ trees or actually implement it in C++ and reason about the trade offs involved in it ?
3. Do the 6.824 course from MIT. This is on my to-do list and will teach you more about Distributed systems and algorithms than any book. Reading about theoretical concepts like logical clock etc is great but wouldn’t it be better if you could implement consensus algorithms in Golang ?
When it comes to books, papers etc in Computer Systems, I view them as references and not as checkboxes that I have to tick. Although all of the books you mentioned are helpful to varying degrees.
My 2 cents from a fellow autodidact and developer interested in Systems.