I'd suggest searching HN for other reviews of the book since it comes up pretty frequently in these threads, but personally I liked that it covered a lot of ground quickly and fairly deeply, and the content remained engaging for me throughout. Some specific things I liked about the book were its coverage of SQL isolation levels and how they work, different ways to coordinate separate systems when you want atomicity (like 2pc and queue-based synchronization), failure modes to keep in mind when dealing with distributed systems (like unbounded network delay and split-brain situations), and references to a whole bunch of production-ready software that solve distributed computing challenges in various ways depending on the trade-offs you're looking for.
Overall I felt better equipped to make intelligent decisions about systems design after reading it.
