It's great. Incredibly dense with useful information and it just blows my mind how much knowledge Martin has about the topic. I recommend watching this talk from him to give a little glimpse of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZjhNTM8XU8 This is just about a little part of one of the chapters.

Oh man, this is good, thank you.

I'm now torn between reading this one first or the Architecture of Enterprise Applications.

I loved Designing Data-Intensive Applications. It gives you the reasons why NoSQL databases exist and the problems they solve. Moreover it gives you reasons to select one over another. It's really excellent and one of my top two CS books

Your other top CS book out of interest?

If it helps, IMO "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" is a better bang-for-the-buck. Enterprise-scale applications are a world unto themselves.

Edit: I meant Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Fowler in my comment above. Recommended by DHH.

My advice would be to skip it completely. It's just packed full of standard GoF OO dogma.

Thanks. So, what you're saying it is redundant if you've read GoF?

But this is mainly for distributed (web) systems, right?

Are there good books for data intensive desktop apps? Like games or CAD design tools?