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.