I took a little break from MySQL in my deep learning paths in favor of looking a bit more broadly. In particular, I realized that I barely knew what Redis what capable of. I knew it was effective as a key value store and had some data structures like lists but I had never really touched anything outside of really basic caching. I picked up Redis in Action by Josiah L. Carlson (there’s also a free ebook version) because it looked like it would give me a good introduction to the possibilities.

While I’m by no means an expert on Redis at this point. I definitely feel a lot more comfortable with the options that Redis makes available. Carlson does an excellent job of giving a basic introduction to Redis and it’s capabilities. The book gives an introduction to the basic Redis philosophy, Redis datastructures, and general Redis management.

In addition to being an introduction, some parts of the book end up serving as a cookbook of sorts. Carlson works through building out different applications using Redis as the database of choice. Sometimes, these applications can get a bit in the weeds for my taste. There’s a lot of discussion about various python features (I’m a python dev so that may weigh into it). This also doesn’t seem like the right format. For some of those sections, it’d be really cool to do an interactive lesson on building it out. Reading it from a book didn’t seem to help make it stick.

That being said, the book is a fairly quick and easy read. While I’m not an expert on Redis now, I definitely know some of the options. This means that when something comes up I know that Redis may be an effective option even if I don’t know off the top of my head how to implement it.