My first Rails job involved a lot of background jobs, and the year and a half I worked at LivingSocial was, in many ways, a crucible of managing background jobs. Today, the book I wish I had been given at the time is now in Beta: “Ruby on Rails Background Jobs with Sidekiq”.

The book is tightly focused at under 70 pages. It’s a pragmatic guide to using Sidekiq background jobs to make your app manageable without notification fatigue. Putting code in a background job is almost trivial—making it fault tolerant, idempotent, and self-healing is the hard part, and it requires care when designing your app’s features.

This book is all about that.