While books are valuable resources, the best learning comes from understanding fundamentals and building real things. This is just a complement to hands-on experience.

Books

Distributed systems

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications
• Database Internals

Math

• Statistics Without Tears

Programming

• Tidy First?
• Refactoring

Papers

Distributed systems

• Lamport, L. (1978). Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
• Brewer, E. (2000). Towards Robust Distributed Systems

Databases

• The Google File System
• Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store