Appendix A. Further Reading
A.1 Chapter 1
Grace Hopper’s use of wires to visualize latency is a great starting point of building intuition around latency. You can find a link to the part of her presentation where she shows some wires that were cut to the exact length of information traveling for a nanosecond at http://dataphys.org/list/grace-hopper-nanoseconds/.
A lot of low latency work is driven by how humans perceive things to give them a good user experience in ecommerce, productivity tools, and others. If you want to know more about the science of human perception, you should check out the research articles “The Information Visualizer, an Information Workspace” by Stuart Card et al (1991) and “Is 100 Milliseconds Too Fast?” by James Dabrowski (2001).
Of course, sometimes you optimize latency even if only computers are involved. Brendan Gregg’s Systems Performance (2020) and Martin Kleppmann’s “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” (2017) are two awesome resources on both working on performance and data, which discuss many of the topics that of this book.
Finally, to motivate yourself some more on why latency is so important, Stuart Cheshire’s article “It’s the Latency, Stupid” (1996) is an awesome read: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html