Once you've read this, pick up Harchol–Balter's book Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems: Queueing Theory in Action. It's a really good introduction to the depth of this topic, and you'll come out with superpowers you didn't have before.
This review is not so nice: https://emptysqua.re/blog/review-queue-theory-book/
This book is one of the few books I own and I couldn't agree more with these reviews. I read maybe 20 to 50 pages of it, and didn't and up with a lot of practically relevant insights. I couldn't say it's a bad book, maybe it's even a good one.
But theory about computer science is always waaaay to removed from practical reality. Only a tiny bit of basic theory is applicable in reality, and from then on, in practice we're just busy fighting with practical problems, we're hardly getting to the theoretic ones.
I'm not sure how you came away with that impression. Three out of three reviewers say they overall enjoyed the book. The complaints fall mostly into four buckets:
- "I wish the book was simpler" (Jesse)
- "I wish the book was more advanced" (Murat)
- "I wish software engineering was more advanced" (Andrew)
- "I didn't understand the arguments the author made for why studying single-server exponential response time systems helps with drawing conclusions for time-sharing, heavy-tailed response time systems" (Jesse)
None of these paint the book in a bad colour, as far as I can tell. They say more about the reader's expectations than the book itself.
Sure. But I'm trying to connect what you said:
> you'll come out with superpowers you didn't have before.
with the impressions from the reviewers.
I don't think they got super powers from the book. In fact their outcomes mirrors my own outcomes when going deep into some math topics and then bringing them to work.
I don't think this is a good resource for an intro tbh. Unless you are interested in proofs and have some probability basics covered, it feels quite dense.
I liked Principles of Product Development Flow a lot more because it was easier to digest, although it's a different application of queuing theory.
That is also a good book containing a few practical applications of queueing theory, but it won't do anything to help you analyse your own systems on a more fundamental level.
Even if you just read the first few chapters of this you will not come out unchanged.